Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 814: Photographing Wolf Kills, Underwater Beavers, and Other Impossible Shots

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Ep. 814: Photographing Wolf Kills, Underwater Beavers, and Other Impossible Shots · The MeatEater Podcast

0:08
Speaker 1: If this is the me Eater podcast coming at you, shirtless, severely,
0:13
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening past, you
0:18
Speaker 1: can't predict.
0:19
Speaker 2: Anything brought to you by first Light. When I'm hunting,
0:23
Speaker 2: I need gear that won't quit. First light builds, no compromise,
0:27
Speaker 2: gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts,
0:31
Speaker 2: just gear that works. Check it out at first light
0:35
Speaker 2: dot com. That's f I R S T l I
0:38
Speaker 2: t E dot com. Join today by wildlife photographer extraordinaire
0:46
Speaker 2: Ronan Donovan. If you ever I don't know, man, if
0:51
Speaker 2: you ever look at National Geographic Right or stuff like that,
0:55
Speaker 2: or some super like amazing wildlife images that pops up
0:58
Speaker 2: and it makes its way all over the place, like,
1:00
Speaker 2: for instance, if you're kind of into wildlife and you
1:02
Speaker 2: have recently seen these extraordinary images of a beaver swimming
1:06
Speaker 2: around under the ice doing his business, or the whitest
1:11
Speaker 2: wolves you've ever seen ganging up and killing Musko's pictures
1:15
Speaker 2: which we're everywhere for a while. That's this guy's wildlife
1:19
Speaker 2: bile just turned photographer filmmaker did Kingdom of the White
1:25
Speaker 2: Wolf for a nat GEOFILM series. He's a national geographic
1:29
Speaker 2: explorer and storytelling fellow and describes himself as a conservation photographer.
1:36
Speaker 3: Don got that right, Yeah, that sounds great.
1:38
Speaker 2: And what we're talking about is who introed us was
1:41
Speaker 2: one of our camera guys who's a vision who paints
1:46
Speaker 2: his pictures of visual imagery. Rick Smith and I was
1:50
Speaker 2: talking about how me and Rick getting a lot of fights.
1:52
Speaker 2: One of the biggest fights I've gotten in about with
1:55
Speaker 2: Rick Smith was about a white T shirt. We're filming
1:58
Speaker 2: one time and we were in Hawaii and I had
2:02
Speaker 2: on a white T shirt. Rick's like, you can't film
2:05
Speaker 2: in a white T shirt? And I said, watch me,
2:09
Speaker 2: and we got to fight about it. I wore the
2:12
Speaker 2: white T shirt and to this day when I see
2:14
Speaker 2: that footage, I'm like, Wow, you really can't wear a
2:18
Speaker 2: white T shirt.
2:19
Speaker 3: They can't do it. Yeah, Rick, generally everything that he
2:25
Speaker 3: puts out is very well thought out.
2:27
Speaker 2: Everything is not thought out. Sometimes Rick is wrong. Rick's
2:34
Speaker 2: off and wrong, and then we have there's a thing
2:37
Speaker 2: that will happen where.
2:40
Speaker 3: Uh are are.
2:44
Speaker 2: We have another guy, Seth, who comes on the show
2:46
Speaker 2: all the time, and Seth and Rick aren't exactly aligned
2:52
Speaker 2: on certain political issues. For instance, COVID respects. They had
3:00
Speaker 2: very different views on what would be an appropriate response
3:03
Speaker 2: to COVID. And my god that I get sick of
3:06
Speaker 2: hearing about that. You'd be like out in the woods,
3:12
Speaker 2: you know, camping or whatever, and just in the background
3:14
Speaker 2: you just hear those two. Yeah, me and Rick Bout
3:21
Speaker 2: came to blows over white T shirts. But he introduced us,
3:24
Speaker 2: and here we are.
3:25
Speaker 3: Here we are. We'll see how many fights we get
3:27
Speaker 3: in something.
3:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, tell me, so we're not gonna We're not gonna
3:30
Speaker 2: be together long enough. We have to go spend a
3:32
Speaker 2: week or two together and then we'll get a fight.
3:36
Speaker 2: Tell me about the the the beaver under the ice thing.
3:40
Speaker 2: It never occurred to me. You don't see pictures of
3:42
Speaker 2: beavers under the ice.
3:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean that's you know, that's like their
3:46
Speaker 3: whole winter world. Yeah.
3:47
Speaker 2: I'm always explaining that. I was explaining that to a
3:50
Speaker 2: guy the other day, where a guy had a problem
3:53
Speaker 2: with beavers that plugged up his irrigation ditch. But then
3:55
Speaker 2: they drained the ditch, and I was explaining, they make mistakes.
4:00
Speaker 2: Like he thought he was cool and could build like
4:02
Speaker 2: an under the ice environment here because he's planning on
4:07
Speaker 2: for four months. Whatever he's planning on. He's trying to
4:10
Speaker 2: figure out how can I live where I never go
4:14
Speaker 2: into the open air, And then you drained.
4:19
Speaker 3: His spot.
4:20
Speaker 2: Now he's in a tough position. He's got to strike
4:23
Speaker 2: off cross country.
4:26
Speaker 3: Beaver and winter without his food, cash and a home.
4:28
Speaker 2: It's like it's like he made a bad mistake. Probably
4:31
Speaker 2: he's made a bad mistake and then he's gonna be
4:33
Speaker 2: like get killed by a yard.
4:35
Speaker 3: Doge, cougars whatever it is.
4:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, so yeah, to tell about that a little bit,
4:40
Speaker 2: like you wanted to someone said, hey, get a picture
4:43
Speaker 2: of a beaver under the ice.
4:44
Speaker 3: The assignment came through and it was. It was with
4:47
Speaker 3: the writer Ben gold Farm. Yep, he was great.
4:50
Speaker 2: We talked about having him on the show. He wrote
4:51
Speaker 2: a book called Eager.
4:52
Speaker 3: You should totally have him on. Really, he's really interesting.
4:55
Speaker 3: He's presenting Bowsing a few times, great times. Communicator, funny,
5:00
Speaker 3: easy going guy and very well researched on all things beaver.
5:03
Speaker 3: And he's got a new book that was about the
5:06
Speaker 3: Boss Roads, yeah, which is also another interesting but yeah, he.
5:10
Speaker 2: Mark one of our colleagues, Mark Kenyon, had him on
5:12
Speaker 2: the show. Yeah about the road stuff.
5:14
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've seen him present and he's great.
5:16
Speaker 4: Oh there he is with Dan Flores.
5:18
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, I mean there's a picture of it. Yeah,
5:23
Speaker 3: I'm sure there are buds.
5:24
Speaker 4: You can tell sounds like you're late to the he
5:26
Speaker 4: needs a hair cut.
5:27
Speaker 2: Let me see that.
5:31
Speaker 4: All right, that's definitely Dan.
5:33
Speaker 2: You can see that's Dan.
5:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm sure they're good friends.
5:38
Speaker 2: Okay, so go on.
5:39
Speaker 3: So yeah, the story got pitched and it was you know,
5:42
Speaker 3: it was kind of like a benefit of beaver's on
5:45
Speaker 3: dry landscapes kind of the story to make it succinct,
5:48
Speaker 3: and they wanted a lot of livestock out culture kind
5:52
Speaker 3: of working lands with beaver's kind of images and some
5:55
Speaker 3: natural history of beavers. And I pitched the idea of like, well,
5:58
Speaker 3: I want to see what they do under the ice.
5:59
Speaker 3: I want to I'm accessing there winter food cash. And
6:03
Speaker 3: it took it took like three winters of trying.
6:06
Speaker 2: I'm serious.
6:07
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, there's like there's some pictures that are of
6:12
Speaker 3: the initial mistakes.
6:14
Speaker 2: Let me, I just want to tell people, if you're
6:17
Speaker 2: listening your you're screwed. No, we're gonna do our. Damn,
6:20
Speaker 2: we're gonna do our.
6:21
Speaker 4: It'll be a rich.
6:23
Speaker 2: Yes, this is mostly the vast majority of our audience
6:27
Speaker 2: only listens. Okay, I'm sorry, and they'll still have We're
6:32
Speaker 2: gonna show a lot of imagery that if you want
6:34
Speaker 2: to check out and us talking about it, go to
6:38
Speaker 2: watch the show on YouTube.
6:40
Speaker 4: Yes, please do.
6:41
Speaker 2: You'll see the imagery. You'll see the imagery. We will
6:45
Speaker 2: do our best to try to tell you what's going on.
6:47
Speaker 4: Your podcast network YouTube channel.
6:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, not the regular meat Eat.
6:51
Speaker 2: Media podcast network. If not, I'll do my best to
6:55
Speaker 2: say what you're seeing. Here is a beaver.
6:59
Speaker 3: This a beaver underwater.
7:01
Speaker 4: At the top of the screen. There's a bit of ice.
7:03
Speaker 3: Yes.
7:03
Speaker 2: Yeah.
7:04
Speaker 3: So the first few attempts were like, essentially I started
7:08
Speaker 3: too late one year, the first winter, tell me why, scheduling. Basically,
7:12
Speaker 3: I started too late. Like the ice is mark, yeah, March,
7:16
Speaker 3: so it's like a warm March, and it was everything
7:19
Speaker 3: was starting to mountain, so you get run off, you
7:20
Speaker 3: get sediment build up in the water column basically. And
7:24
Speaker 3: I was at the site along the Rocky Mountain front
7:26
Speaker 3: in Depou year, just this cool little ranch that's up
7:29
Speaker 3: against public and was putting this system under the ice.
7:33
Speaker 3: And it's this whole elaborate setup where it's like, I
7:36
Speaker 3: gotta drill test holes, just a small little chainsaw hole
7:41
Speaker 3: through the ice to put a GoPro under water with
7:43
Speaker 3: a light to be able to just like to see
7:46
Speaker 3: what's going on, Like where, what's the underwater world?
7:48
Speaker 2: Like do you mind if I real quick tell people something?
7:50
Speaker 3: Sure?
7:52
Speaker 2: Uh, I realized we kind of left something a little
7:55
Speaker 2: bit unsaid in the North. I'm gonna start with something.
7:59
Speaker 2: I'm gonna start with a different thing. If you take
8:01
Speaker 2: beavers from the North and transplant them down south, you know,
8:04
Speaker 2: it takes them a while to realize they don't need
8:06
Speaker 2: to do all this. They're like, old, we got to
8:10
Speaker 2: make a food cash. Yeah, the beaver's down south.
8:12
Speaker 3: They no, you don't.
8:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, but if you take a beer from the north
8:15
Speaker 2: and turn down south, it'll be a while. So he
8:19
Speaker 2: realizes he doesn't need to go through all this bullshit.
8:21
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like someone who grew up in the Great Depression.
8:23
Speaker 5: Yeah, just stuff and its stuff and cash in their mattress.
8:26
Speaker 2: Like why does my mom so a beaver? So this
8:32
Speaker 2: is this is about the North.
8:35
Speaker 3: Uh.
8:36
Speaker 2: A beaver needs to have deep water. They like deep
8:39
Speaker 2: water inis it's where they escape. But they need to
8:41
Speaker 2: have deep water in the winter because everything's going to freeze.
8:45
Speaker 2: So they'll have a lodge or a bank den with
8:48
Speaker 2: a submarine entrance where they can come in a hole
8:52
Speaker 2: underwater and then go up into a cavity that they
8:56
Speaker 2: excavate out of a riverbank or the shore of a
8:59
Speaker 2: lake or whatever. Or they create a dome shaped lodge
9:04
Speaker 2: and they have a cavity in there that is somewhat
9:07
Speaker 2: insulated and they can live up in there for food
9:11
Speaker 2: because they can't get out of the ice until they
9:13
Speaker 2: they're very good at busting up through the ice. But
9:15
Speaker 2: when they can't get out of the ice, they start
9:20
Speaker 2: collecting all kinds of twigs and small things, willow, whatever
9:24
Speaker 2: they can get to they like, and they weigh it
9:26
Speaker 2: down with big heavy logs so that it pins it
9:30
Speaker 2: all down. And then throughout the winter they can just
9:33
Speaker 2: go to this cash and then they usually have the
9:36
Speaker 2: cash right in front of their lodge or right in
9:38
Speaker 2: front of their bank den, and usually skirting in on
9:41
Speaker 2: the left or right side. They have a runway and
9:43
Speaker 2: the entrance up into their hut or bank den, and
9:48
Speaker 2: that's their food pile. And a food pile can be
9:50
Speaker 2: the size.
9:51
Speaker 5: Of a parked truck, and it's visually it's like a
9:54
Speaker 5: raft essentially that they're sinking to the bottom of the
9:56
Speaker 5: stream bed or the river bed.
9:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's a surface play like you can bottom yeah,
10:01
Speaker 2: until you get a couple of feet of snow. You
10:03
Speaker 2: can spot the food cash. But it's like an iceberg
10:06
Speaker 2: for whatever's sticking up. How what's the formula with the iceberg,
10:11
Speaker 2: like ten percent of it or something.
10:13
Speaker 3: Yeah, thirty seventy something like that.
10:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, whatever sticking up that thing is probably packed with
10:18
Speaker 2: feed all the way down to the bottom, and they
10:20
Speaker 2: excavate all that mud out to keep it deep. And
10:23
Speaker 2: if you jump, like if you're looking for a place
10:25
Speaker 2: to dive in a pond, if you jump off a
10:27
Speaker 2: beaver lodge, you might be hitting six eight feet of
10:29
Speaker 2: water because they excavate all that mud out to build
10:32
Speaker 2: that lodge and it creates this big deep pool and
10:36
Speaker 2: that's their refuge if like under the ice where there
10:38
Speaker 2: are cash is so trying to get a picture one
10:42
Speaker 2: going about his business down there is what we're talking about, Yeah,
10:47
Speaker 2: said state.
10:47
Speaker 3: It's a good setup. Yeah, I think it is. I mean,
10:49
Speaker 3: it's it's like the one of the coolest things that
10:52
Speaker 3: an animal does in the way of like casing food
10:54
Speaker 3: for months and months. Like there aren't many other animals
10:57
Speaker 3: that can do that, like you know a lot of
10:59
Speaker 3: carnivorous cash, but they get discovered pretty quickly by birds
11:03
Speaker 3: or other carnivores. But like the beavers have this thing
11:05
Speaker 3: where they're able to just store yeah way north like
11:08
Speaker 3: in Alaska or edge of the Arctic. I mean it's like, yeah,
11:11
Speaker 3: six months plus of food that they need to cash
11:15
Speaker 3: in this form of and it's just a cambium, Like
11:18
Speaker 3: it's just this little tiny bit and they're mainly just
11:20
Speaker 3: I think a lot of it's just maintenance, you know,
11:22
Speaker 3: where they're just like feeding the micro gut biome in
11:25
Speaker 3: their stomach enough to like five versus like I don't
11:28
Speaker 3: know if they necessarily are gaining weight. It's just kind
11:31
Speaker 3: of like a maintenance thing. And so these beavers that
11:33
Speaker 3: I was focused on trying to get these pictures, like
11:36
Speaker 3: the beginning, it was just murky water sediment you get
11:40
Speaker 3: I was actually amazed. You get a little bit of runoff,
11:41
Speaker 3: even if it's like teens temperature and you have sun,
11:45
Speaker 3: you'd start to see in the water column just a
11:47
Speaker 3: little waze coming in. Yeah, so the first one, like
11:52
Speaker 3: the next couple of pictures here, Phil, there's so.
11:55
Speaker 2: That's your setup.
11:56
Speaker 3: That's the setup. Yeah, that's kind of the crazy lights
11:58
Speaker 3: set up underwater, can camera, live feed to a laptop,
12:03
Speaker 3: and you know, beavers are mainly nocturnal, and that was
12:07
Speaker 3: what I was going on. So it's basically a lot
12:08
Speaker 3: of cold nights doing that.
12:11
Speaker 2: So here you are, you just laid out on the
12:13
Speaker 2: ice with all this electronics.
12:15
Speaker 3: It looks like ice fishing set up without the shanty to.
12:19
Speaker 2: Keep you warm. Yeah, let me hit you with one
12:22
Speaker 2: thing about this, just because it's coming up right away.
12:24
Speaker 2: They're very like if you go in, if you're trapping
12:28
Speaker 2: and you go in, set up a lodge and your
12:30
Speaker 2: axe and holes through the ice, and they're already pretty lethargic.
12:34
Speaker 2: In the winter. You might not see activity three or
12:36
Speaker 2: four days because they spook so bad. Were you finding
12:40
Speaker 2: that they would take a while to get used to
12:41
Speaker 2: all that change.
12:42
Speaker 3: They were pretty curious even like they were. Yeah, the
12:45
Speaker 3: first time I set up, like next picture, you can
12:47
Speaker 3: see this like pea soup beaver coming by. That was
12:51
Speaker 3: the first night really. Yeah, Yeah, because they they're basically
12:55
Speaker 3: that's the.
12:55
Speaker 2: First night, the first year. Yep, oh shit, I'd be
12:59
Speaker 2: happy with that.
13:00
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, working on different.
13:05
Speaker 3: But the pose is cool, Like I love that image.
13:07
Speaker 3: It's the beaver with a stick in his mouth and
13:09
Speaker 3: a curvetail, Like you can kind of tell it's a beaver,
13:12
Speaker 3: but the people that are listening, it's just like a
13:14
Speaker 3: You could just throw a whole bag of gravel and
13:17
Speaker 3: sand and mud into the frame and you can kind
13:21
Speaker 3: of see a beaver through it with the ice on
13:22
Speaker 3: top of it.
13:23
Speaker 4: It could also be a rat that had drowned, and.
13:25
Speaker 2: Yea, it's clear.
13:27
Speaker 3: If you think it couldn't be a rat or a beaver,
13:30
Speaker 3: then my editors are gonna be like, that's not gonna work.
13:32
Speaker 2: So they're like, so that's like a dead rat and
13:33
Speaker 2: you're tough.
13:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. You just made that up. You just created that.
13:37
Speaker 3: The next picture was getting a little bit closer. This
13:39
Speaker 3: is the same site you can see. So the other
13:42
Speaker 3: thing about starting too late was they'd pretty much gone
13:45
Speaker 3: through most of their food cash already and they were
13:47
Speaker 3: already getting access out of the ice. Yeah, because the
13:49
Speaker 3: stuff was melting on the edges and they'll they will
13:51
Speaker 3: come out during the winter if if they so choose
13:54
Speaker 3: and there's access.
13:55
Speaker 2: You know what, trappers will say, They'll say that the
13:57
Speaker 2: feed pile sours okay, and they'll say that they don't
14:01
Speaker 2: like like after a couple of months, they really don't
14:04
Speaker 2: want the feed pile. And that's when they start doing
14:08
Speaker 2: like you know how that's always the ice is a
14:10
Speaker 2: little thin along the damage. They'll start going and pressing
14:15
Speaker 2: up with their head and body to start trying to
14:17
Speaker 2: find any way to bust out because they everybody says
14:21
Speaker 2: they get sick of it.
14:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean you can see this is all like
14:24
Speaker 3: sediments on top of the sticks. And I was so
14:27
Speaker 3: this this was learning curve for me. It was like
14:28
Speaker 3: way too late. The beavers were already actually doing more
14:31
Speaker 3: excavation up creek. So I would literally be there watching
14:35
Speaker 3: at night, get through all that set up, be freezing
14:38
Speaker 3: my ass off, and then see like a brown wall
14:40
Speaker 3: come through the frame and realize that there was a
14:43
Speaker 3: beaver up creak just like excavating. Yeah, just doing a
14:47
Speaker 3: bunch of stuff. And then it's done for the night.
14:48
Speaker 3: There's like no settling at all.
14:50
Speaker 2: And you see like all kinds of trout blasting by.
14:53
Speaker 3: You'd see some trouts this site had some really good
14:55
Speaker 3: brook trout. Next picture you can see the same kind
14:58
Speaker 3: of site beaver coming by curious getting closer. So this
15:02
Speaker 3: was the first year. Are you manually yeah, this is
15:05
Speaker 3: all triggered.
15:06
Speaker 4: You're like, oh, okay, yeah, yeah.
15:07
Speaker 3: So I'm like seeing it coming. It's live live, but
15:10
Speaker 3: it's like, no, it is, Yeah, it's a live feed.
15:12
Speaker 3: So it's not like a like a motion triggered camera
15:15
Speaker 3: system that are like camera traps that I use for
15:18
Speaker 3: photographing wolves or other things bears, where you're not there
15:21
Speaker 3: at all for those pictures. But for this, yeah, I'm there.
15:24
Speaker 3: That laptop set up is I'm seeing what's happening. I
15:28
Speaker 3: have ambient lights that are constant, that are low, so
15:33
Speaker 3: I have I can see what's coming in the frame.
15:35
Speaker 3: I can see the beaver coming in, and then I
15:37
Speaker 3: trigger the actual camera.
15:38
Speaker 2: All these You're like, you're hit, You're like wham.
15:40
Speaker 3: Yeah.
15:41
Speaker 2: I just assumed when I saw the images, when when
15:45
Speaker 2: they came out, it was like, you know, I don't
15:47
Speaker 2: know if in the wildlife photography world there was a little.
15:50
Speaker 3: Splash nice yea.
15:52
Speaker 2: I assumed it was all camera trap shit. I don't
15:55
Speaker 2: know how that. I never thought how that would work underwater.
15:57
Speaker 2: I guess it doesn't work underwater.
15:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean we, I say we. There's some amazing
16:01
Speaker 3: photo engineers at National Geographic and some other companies that
16:04
Speaker 3: contract and worked on the system. They did develop an
16:08
Speaker 3: underwater camera trap system. I tried it out with this.
16:10
Speaker 3: It just wasn't the right application. It was Maine for
16:13
Speaker 3: doing like submerging, diving down maybe like fifty meters, having
16:18
Speaker 3: a diver behind the system and then setting it up.
16:20
Speaker 3: But it is like a self contained lights underwater housing
16:24
Speaker 3: has a computer model AI trained live feed video camera
16:29
Speaker 3: that triggers based on what comes in front of it
16:31
Speaker 3: and for my purposes. I tried it out, but it
16:34
Speaker 3: was like a total pain, Like I had to deploy
16:36
Speaker 3: it down. I couldn't see any live feed do it
16:38
Speaker 3: didn't have any wiring coming up, so I couldn't really
16:41
Speaker 3: control it from top side. So this was a whole
16:44
Speaker 3: system that developed with this guy Tom O'Brien at National
16:47
Speaker 3: Geographic Photo Engineering.
16:48
Speaker 2: Will be the longest steakout you ever did.
16:50
Speaker 3: The first one was for this. It was like a
16:53
Speaker 3: week and a half straight.
16:54
Speaker 2: I mean how many hours, sorry, how many hours I
16:56
Speaker 2: would do like steak out?
16:58
Speaker 3: I mean for the beaver one maybe like sixteen hours
17:00
Speaker 3: something like that single steakout. Yeah, yeah, it's long sit. Yeah.
17:07
Speaker 3: I put up a tent for a few of them.
17:09
Speaker 2: Serious, Yeah, you'd make a good ice Wisconsin deer on
17:15
Speaker 2: their neck is standing up for six or seven pictures,
17:17
Speaker 2: then you go back. He's wasting a lot of talent, yeah,
17:19
Speaker 2: because he could be a phenomenal ice fisher. How you
17:22
Speaker 2: been here sixteen hours?
17:24
Speaker 3: I've never I think I've been ice fishing once. It's
17:27
Speaker 3: all I needed. Yeah, that picture here, This was like
17:31
Speaker 3: the three point zero setup. So I had like a
17:33
Speaker 3: little kind of like high tech hobo camp. Had a
17:36
Speaker 3: little bit of weather protection there.
17:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's got uh this is two by fours. I
17:41
Speaker 2: see wall of aluminum beaver lodge. I see a ridge rest,
17:45
Speaker 2: a tarp, tent. Yeah, tons of.
17:48
Speaker 3: Tons of wires. I did two full nights here in
17:51
Speaker 3: the sleeping bag and like falling asleep and waking up
17:55
Speaker 3: like it's tedious. And they didn't come out once at
17:58
Speaker 3: this site. And at nine am they had another lodge
18:03
Speaker 3: up creek, and they would come to this one where
18:06
Speaker 3: they had their food cash at like nine am. The
18:08
Speaker 3: two of them, they'd chatter they'd have a conversation and
18:10
Speaker 3: then they'd start doing their feeding rounds coming out to
18:12
Speaker 3: the cash pile. So I didn't have to do any
18:14
Speaker 3: nighttime work at this one anymore. And then you go
18:18
Speaker 3: back one photo and now you start to see like
18:21
Speaker 3: the clarity coming in like totally different situations.
18:25
Speaker 2: So you're moving to You're you're picking your beaver ponds
18:29
Speaker 2: based on.
18:30
Speaker 3: Clear clarity only that basically, And I realized too.
18:33
Speaker 2: Like I need beaver's in a clear spot and.
18:35
Speaker 3: The pond, Like initially was like I'm gonna start a pond.
18:37
Speaker 3: It's gonna be great. They're gonna be contained. I know
18:39
Speaker 3: where they are. You can see the cash, but the pond,
18:42
Speaker 3: the sediment of the pond is crazy, like it never
18:44
Speaker 3: settles and there's all these tannins. There's no water flow.
18:47
Speaker 3: Basically you think of like you know, Great Lakes area,
18:50
Speaker 3: those ponds are brown tea water essent. Sure.
18:53
Speaker 2: And then just the nature of a beaver pond, you
18:56
Speaker 2: could have like a crystal clear trout stream and then
19:00
Speaker 2: you get into the dam like like dams have, beaver
19:03
Speaker 2: ponds have a very short life cycle because they set,
19:06
Speaker 2: they load up with sediments so fast. They're like they're
19:08
Speaker 2: a sediment trap. Yeah, you know what I mean. It's
19:10
Speaker 2: like a picture I never thought about. You know, a
19:13
Speaker 2: lot of times you get you chop a hole and
19:15
Speaker 2: you like put it around your eyes and you can
19:17
Speaker 2: kind of see what's going on. Yeah, but yeah, I
19:19
Speaker 2: could picture now that that would be an that even
19:22
Speaker 2: that though you're not happy with that, one would be
19:24
Speaker 2: an extraordinarily clear water.
19:26
Speaker 3: This was extraordinary clear water. And this was a section
19:28
Speaker 3: where they have I mean, the Beebles will have multiple
19:30
Speaker 3: you know, they have multiple dam structures, and so a
19:33
Speaker 3: lot of the times the upper dams will filter out
19:36
Speaker 3: a lot of sediment to begin and so you get
19:38
Speaker 3: this was like the perfect mix of a stream that
19:40
Speaker 3: had the right amount of flow. So if there was disturbance,
19:44
Speaker 3: you know, they do kick up dust or settment whenever they.
19:46
Speaker 2: Go by, and in some ways you take that as
19:49
Speaker 2: a bad sign. Like if you chop a hole and
19:53
Speaker 2: look down in there and you can see the runs,
19:55
Speaker 2: yeah have sediment, it's a sign.
19:58
Speaker 3: That they're in there. Yeah exactly. Yeah.
20:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, so if it's too clear, you might be like, oh.
20:02
Speaker 3: Right, what's no beaver? No activity? Yeah, So this site
20:05
Speaker 3: was great and that was the picture ended up being
20:08
Speaker 3: the one that we selected, and yeah, god, that's awesome. Yeah,
20:12
Speaker 3: just trying to show because every stick in this picture
20:14
Speaker 3: beaver's placed, and the idea that they engineered the landscape
20:18
Speaker 3: so profoundly that they create this, as you said, refugio
20:22
Speaker 3: for themselves throughout the winter where they can stay safe
20:26
Speaker 3: and fat and happy and warm. I mean, the structures
20:30
Speaker 3: of lodges are basically like Adobe's. They mut them, they
20:32
Speaker 3: make them incredible.
20:33
Speaker 2: And as he choose the as he choose the cambium off,
20:36
Speaker 2: they'll sticks sink down.
20:38
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, they'll and they'll come back like the
20:41
Speaker 3: ones under the beaver. Now in the picture, those are
20:44
Speaker 3: all discarded so that you can see they've been stripped
20:46
Speaker 3: and then they just sink to the bottom.
20:47
Speaker 2: So this beaver right here is he did you catch
20:51
Speaker 2: him drawing? Is he drawing that off the feed pile
20:55
Speaker 2: or is he still working on the feed.
20:56
Speaker 3: Pile drawing that off?
20:58
Speaker 2: So the feed pile, so he's nabbing that.
21:00
Speaker 3: His piles on the left side of the frame, kind
21:01
Speaker 3: of in the back there, and then the darkness that
21:05
Speaker 3: this beaver's headed into is the lodge entrance.
21:08
Speaker 2: So he's taking that sucker up in there to take
21:10
Speaker 2: it in for a snack, and then he'll boot it
21:12
Speaker 2: back out yep, exactly, and come and discard it. So
21:15
Speaker 2: that that big pile below him of all those sticks
21:18
Speaker 2: that have had the bark stripped off, that's all stuff
21:21
Speaker 2: he's kicked out of his lodge. But he's going up
21:24
Speaker 2: in there because he's got to get up into a
21:26
Speaker 2: thing you don't think about. Yeah, he can't eat underwater, right,
21:30
Speaker 2: he's got to drag that stick up in somewhere and
21:33
Speaker 2: find a little pocket up in a bank down or
21:35
Speaker 2: lodge to chew it. And then he wouldn't have any
21:38
Speaker 2: room in there if he never moved him back out,
21:40
Speaker 2: So then he's got to clean it out and make
21:43
Speaker 2: a little just like a little uh, I guess you'd
21:45
Speaker 2: call it like a midden. Yep. Yeah, he's got like
21:47
Speaker 2: a little trash midden outside his front.
21:49
Speaker 3: Door, yeah exactly. And that's what piles up. I mean, like,
21:52
Speaker 3: the amount of maintenance they have to do in their
21:55
Speaker 3: territory is pretty impressive, not just the dams, but like
21:57
Speaker 3: everything around it.
21:58
Speaker 2: What's cool too, is how if you catch one on
22:04
Speaker 2: the land, you know, he's very vulnerable. Yeah, I mean
22:07
Speaker 2: you can pick him up by the tail. I don't
22:09
Speaker 2: recommend it, but seen it done, done, seen it done.
22:13
Speaker 2: Don't recommend it, but I mean they're vulnerable. Like anything
22:16
Speaker 2: can catch a beaver, any predator if he catches them
22:19
Speaker 2: on land and gets between the water and the beaver,
22:22
Speaker 2: the beaver's kind of his. But you look at that
22:24
Speaker 2: sucker in the water. It looks like a porpoise. I
22:27
Speaker 2: mean it's so graceful.
22:29
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I mean they just hat a straight line
22:31
Speaker 4: on there.
22:32
Speaker 2: It's just all curves.
22:33
Speaker 3: And yeah, they swim fast, and you know human olympian
22:36
Speaker 3: can swim underwater, and they just do it that little
22:38
Speaker 3: flick at the tail. It was amazing how fast they
22:40
Speaker 3: would because they're they're pretty slow, like generally under the water,
22:44
Speaker 3: they're not unless they're scared. They're just kind of like cruising.
22:48
Speaker 3: And there's no previous picture where they're kind of like
22:50
Speaker 3: torpedoing where it just kind of like do a little
22:52
Speaker 3: tail flick and then just just talk. It just be
22:54
Speaker 3: perfectly buoyant in the middle of the water column.
22:57
Speaker 2: Let's see cut more cruise.
22:59
Speaker 3: I think these all the yeah, those beaver ones, we
23:01
Speaker 3: have some.
23:02
Speaker 2: More of a I wanted to see more of your
23:03
Speaker 2: like total keepers.
23:06
Speaker 3: I mean I just showed two.
23:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, so in the end, you you you don't have
23:10
Speaker 2: like twenty that you're super happy with.
23:13
Speaker 3: No, I mean I have like so basically there's like
23:15
Speaker 3: four frames previous to this where you're getting like the
23:18
Speaker 3: beaver coming in. So I'm like taking a series of
23:21
Speaker 3: images beating up in and out. But I only had
23:23
Speaker 3: like I don't know, five opportunities with this really water clarity.
23:28
Speaker 2: And yeah, so how many hours total if you had
23:31
Speaker 2: to just take a ballpark spent how many hours you
23:34
Speaker 2: spend on the ice.
23:35
Speaker 3: On the ice, it was probably probably over one hundred.
23:42
Speaker 2: How many times did you punch through the ice and
23:43
Speaker 2: get wet.
23:45
Speaker 3: Less than one hundred, but not too far away.
23:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's see, that's that's like a deadly we should
23:50
Speaker 2: do a public service announcement. Yes, beavers use their runs.
23:56
Speaker 2: This is kind of this is kind of trippy. Beavers
23:58
Speaker 2: use their runs so much. You can have eighteen inches
24:03
Speaker 2: of ice on each side of a run and the
24:06
Speaker 2: run has no ice or an inch of ice. They
24:10
Speaker 2: use them so much. I think they have to. Yeah,
24:13
Speaker 2: it's to the point where a lot of times you
24:15
Speaker 2: can once you learn what you're looking at. You can
24:16
Speaker 2: look at a frozen beaver pond and by the discolorations
24:19
Speaker 2: in the ice, see the runs. And also they're exhaling underwater,
24:23
Speaker 2: they're blowing bubbles, and all those bubbles freeze into the ice.
24:27
Speaker 2: But often I will tell like I'll be out and
24:29
Speaker 2: messing around with my kids, I'll be like, watch your
24:31
Speaker 2: ass in front of that lodge, because there's gonna be
24:34
Speaker 2: bad ice. Yeah, it is a day, and it's from
24:36
Speaker 2: them just whirling around there, whirling around.
24:38
Speaker 3: Just keeping it stirred up, just like a little agitation
24:40
Speaker 3: in the water column that keeps it like that. Yeah,
24:42
Speaker 3: I mean when you.
24:43
Speaker 2: See you were punching your boots, you fall in like.
24:45
Speaker 3: Up to your elbows like those times. And with chest
24:48
Speaker 3: waiters that gets sketchy too, and yeah, but yeah, most
24:51
Speaker 3: of the time I didn't lose any gear, thankfully, which
24:54
Speaker 3: was the thing that I was kind of the most
24:55
Speaker 3: worried about, even stuff like melting through the ice. During
25:00
Speaker 3: that warmer section like that one that I was in
25:02
Speaker 3: in March. I went into April too, and it was
25:05
Speaker 3: like full on runoff. Was I was doomed.
25:10
Speaker 2: Growing up the Great Lakes, like we spent a lot
25:13
Speaker 2: of time on the ice. I would kind of categorize
25:16
Speaker 2: my head when someone said they fell through the ice,
25:18
Speaker 2: it would be did you get your hair wet? And
25:23
Speaker 2: there's fell through the ice one time in my life
25:26
Speaker 2: where I got my hair wet. A lot of times
25:30
Speaker 2: it's like knees down, waist down. One time and it
25:34
Speaker 2: was at a beaver lodge. Did I get my hair wet?
25:39
Speaker 2: That's a big fall through. That's because most of them
25:41
Speaker 2: are like in the end, you know, it's scary for
25:43
Speaker 2: a minute, but then it's like fairly minor.
25:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, usually like your chest up is still out of
25:48
Speaker 3: the water, like okay, I'm okay, but.
25:52
Speaker 2: Complete and total collapse. That's great, man. So what uh,
25:58
Speaker 2: let's talk about background bit? Oh where I heard it's
26:02
Speaker 2: in Krin's notes. You were like trouble maker when you're
26:04
Speaker 2: a little kid. Yeah, I was a trouble maker.
26:07
Speaker 3: How bad? I got a couple of felonies when I
26:10
Speaker 3: was Yeah, when I was thirteen.
26:12
Speaker 2: Is there such a thing?
26:13
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, they can charge you and then doesn't miss No.
26:16
Speaker 2: Real bad troublemaker. Yeah.
26:17
Speaker 3: It was thieves, Like I was just like stealing stuff.
26:20
Speaker 2: Were you brought up poor?
26:22
Speaker 3: Not poor? No?
26:23
Speaker 2: No, we just a rebel.
26:25
Speaker 3: We were probably I don't know, lower middle class when
26:27
Speaker 3: my dad built a house I grew up in. My
26:30
Speaker 3: parents were kind of like back of the Landers, but
26:32
Speaker 3: not hippies. Mom had her master's in teaching and dad
26:37
Speaker 3: was in Vietnam combat and then came home.
26:41
Speaker 2: And yeah, so did he have a hard time coming
26:44
Speaker 2: home and dealing with all that he did.
26:46
Speaker 3: I mean he's he's very well adjusted with it now.
26:51
Speaker 3: I think in a lot of ways, it's very open
26:53
Speaker 3: and talked about anything. But for a long time, no,
26:55
Speaker 3: he just bottled it up. I mean, he drank a
26:57
Speaker 3: lot coming back. It was hard for him coming back.
26:59
Speaker 3: You wouldn't say Francisco. He's driving cabs, kind of like
27:02
Speaker 3: sleeping out of the cab and just a hard time
27:04
Speaker 3: coming home. And people were just like they didn't want
27:06
Speaker 3: to hear about it.
27:07
Speaker 2: Man, I grew up around my dad was World War
27:11
Speaker 2: two guy, But I grew up around so many Vietnam guys.
27:13
Speaker 2: I don't know why there's such a I don't know.
27:15
Speaker 2: Just like, but even if I just think about in
27:18
Speaker 2: my area around our lake, like it'd be like Vietnam goy,
27:21
Speaker 2: Vietnam got Vietnam and not knowing it now, not not
27:26
Speaker 2: or sorry, not knowing it then, but thinking back now
27:30
Speaker 2: and be like, oh yeah, man, there was a lot
27:32
Speaker 2: of Like I was born, I was born in seventy four, dude,
27:37
Speaker 2: there was a lot of tension about that shit when
27:39
Speaker 2: I was a kid that you just you know, you kid,
27:41
Speaker 2: you don't conceptualize everything. I even remember my dad saying
27:44
Speaker 2: it's different for them. My dad'd be like, we came home,
27:47
Speaker 2: we were heroes. If you wanted when I came home,
27:50
Speaker 2: if you wanted a job, the right thing to do
27:52
Speaker 2: was someone else would step aside to make a job
27:54
Speaker 2: for you when you came home from World War Two.
27:56
Speaker 2: He says, these guys, is not that way, and it
27:58
Speaker 2: was alive and well you know at that time.
28:01
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I think it's still it's still like a
28:04
Speaker 3: palpable memory for that generation and those of us. Yeah,
28:08
Speaker 3: raised by that. I mean, my dad's definitely I think
28:11
Speaker 3: has pts.
28:12
Speaker 2: What year were you born?
28:14
Speaker 3: I was born in eighty three.
28:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, So he's like, it wasn't old, Like the war
28:19
Speaker 2: wasn't old.
28:20
Speaker 3: No, no, no, I mean, and it wasn't something that
28:22
Speaker 3: he didn't start talking about until he went back. Actually
28:25
Speaker 3: he has like a beautiful relationship now with Vietnam, and
28:28
Speaker 3: he's been back maybe like fifteen times.
28:30
Speaker 2: Kid.
28:30
Speaker 3: He has started an NGO or yeah, contribute to an
28:33
Speaker 3: NGO and started his own branch of it to help
28:36
Speaker 3: build homes like two thousand dollars homes for veterans in Vietnam,
28:40
Speaker 3: specifically in the southern end where he was in the
28:41
Speaker 3: Mekong Delta. Oh really, he was on those river patrol
28:43
Speaker 3: boats like the apocalyst now boats.
28:45
Speaker 5: Yeah, my father in law was the worked on one
28:49
Speaker 5: of the barges that serviced those boats, and he went
28:52
Speaker 5: back like two years ago to the village where they
28:55
Speaker 5: were anchored.
28:55
Speaker 3: Yep. Yeah, I went back with my dad for a
28:58
Speaker 3: visit in two I was ten. There was a translator
29:02
Speaker 3: ming that my dad worked with, who was this like
29:05
Speaker 3: badass little dude who went on to work with the
29:06
Speaker 3: seals after my dad left, and he was my dad
29:10
Speaker 3: thought he was killed. He heard some story of the
29:12
Speaker 3: Via Kong. Afterwards, I put him interm camp and then
29:15
Speaker 3: got caught up to him afterwards in a bar or something,
29:17
Speaker 3: and then he died. And then my dad was reading
29:20
Speaker 3: a book and found out that he was still alive.
29:22
Speaker 3: So really we went and met him, and yeah, it
29:25
Speaker 3: was cool. The guy's great. He passed away just a
29:28
Speaker 3: few years ago, and but my dad supports his family
29:30
Speaker 3: a lot, and yeah, just a cool relationship that it
29:33
Speaker 3: was very healing. It's been healing from my dad a
29:34
Speaker 3: lot in that world to go back and have that relationship.
29:37
Speaker 2: But you ran pretty wild, ran.
29:39
Speaker 3: Pretty wild, and yeah, some of that 's probably like
29:40
Speaker 3: a repercussion of maybe some of the trauma that my
29:43
Speaker 3: dad brought home with him. He was gone a lot,
29:48
Speaker 3: you know. The the impetus for what I was doing
29:51
Speaker 3: stealing stuff was all about like how to fit in,
29:53
Speaker 3: like how to be cool, how to try to get friends.
29:56
Speaker 3: And I just I was bigger than most kids when
29:59
Speaker 3: I was younger, just tall, kind of fell into like
30:01
Speaker 3: a bully roll and started to just like act out
30:05
Speaker 3: as a way of getting attention. It was like a
30:07
Speaker 3: negative feedback loop. And there was trouble at home. My
30:11
Speaker 3: parents got divorced, you know, there was some abuse, and
30:15
Speaker 3: I would act out in school and then like stealing
30:18
Speaker 3: stuff just became like an easy progression. And my brother's older,
30:22
Speaker 3: and so I kind of like would run a little
30:24
Speaker 3: harder because I had him in front of me. And
30:27
Speaker 3: it was literally just like a few months of realizing
30:31
Speaker 3: you could steal stuff like people where I grew up.
30:34
Speaker 3: I grew up in Roal, Vermont, and people don't lock
30:36
Speaker 3: their car doors good. And it was like middle school
30:40
Speaker 3: spring break, walking around the town near where I grew
30:44
Speaker 3: up and just like stealing stuff and then started stealing
30:46
Speaker 3: bigger things. The two felonies were I broke into a
30:50
Speaker 3: truck and stole someone's shotgun. God at some guy's like antique.
30:53
Speaker 3: It was like his grandfather's shotgun. Feel bad about that,
30:56
Speaker 3: still he got it back. I treated it pretty well
31:00
Speaker 3: for being thirteen and not knowing what I was doing.
31:02
Speaker 3: And then another one was breaking entering into like a
31:04
Speaker 3: golf course maintenance shed, like messing around stuff, and like
31:09
Speaker 3: breaking entering is like an automatic automatic felony.
31:11
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, it feels like yeah yeah.
31:15
Speaker 3: And so much of it was like this this idea around.
31:18
Speaker 2: Stealing Brian harm and stuff, whatever, this.
31:21
Speaker 3: Idea around like young men, like teenagers, we don't really
31:24
Speaker 3: have like initiations anymore, like rights of passage, which is
31:27
Speaker 3: a thing that seems to be kind of built into
31:29
Speaker 3: the human psyche to have these stages of life that
31:32
Speaker 3: we are accepted that we have to go through. And
31:35
Speaker 3: testosterone is one of those things where like, if it's
31:37
Speaker 3: not in service, it's like a big it's a big problem.
31:40
Speaker 3: If like men aren't in service to creating and protecting
31:43
Speaker 3: more life in communities, then it's just going to become
31:46
Speaker 3: this dangerous thing. And I think that this was like
31:50
Speaker 3: a in the absence of those initiations. I've come to
31:53
Speaker 3: understand now that like men, especially boys will do rough
31:58
Speaker 3: initiations themselves where they'll just like they'll build push the
32:02
Speaker 3: boundaries because they're not given those guardrails necessarily. And so
32:06
Speaker 3: I was thankfully my parents stepped in. My dad was
32:10
Speaker 3: now a bound instructor for years, like an outdoor experiential
32:13
Speaker 3: learning program, and was like, all right, we just got
32:15
Speaker 3: to send run into the wild again. And I grew
32:19
Speaker 3: up rural kid, you know, run around and we didn't
32:21
Speaker 3: have grown up I didn't want to have guns around
32:23
Speaker 3: the house. But we didn't eat meat either, and all
32:26
Speaker 3: grow vegetarian. We had fished sometimes, but my parents sent
32:29
Speaker 3: me out to Oregon to this like wilderness therapy camp.
32:35
Speaker 3: This after you got in trouble is after I got
32:37
Speaker 3: in trouble. We got the courts, like I had enough.
32:38
Speaker 3: I had the four mister meters and two felonies, And
32:41
Speaker 3: there's like a point system around if you, you know,
32:44
Speaker 3: do a certain number of things, you can have to
32:47
Speaker 3: go to jumail attention center. If you do a certain amount,
32:50
Speaker 3: it could be the judge's discretion. And I was in
32:52
Speaker 3: that judge's discretion realm God, and my parents didn't want
32:55
Speaker 3: me to go to juvie, and so they found this camp.
32:58
Speaker 3: It was like I was still in the court sys
32:59
Speaker 3: judge satisfied. Was judge satisfied with that? We won't send
33:02
Speaker 3: him a juvie, send him here and we'll reevalue when
33:04
Speaker 3: he gets back. And so yeah, I went out when
33:07
Speaker 3: I was thirteen. I had my fourteenth birthday under like
33:10
Speaker 3: a tarp tent. Like it's kind of like a hoods
33:12
Speaker 3: in the woods idea where you're stripped down of like
33:15
Speaker 3: all your identifying possessions were wearing like fatigues, army surplus
33:20
Speaker 3: store stuff, and you're sleeping under just like a tarp tent.
33:23
Speaker 3: And I was the youngest kid. The rest were yeah, fifteen, sixteen,
33:27
Speaker 3: eighteen year olds and a lot of like hard There
33:29
Speaker 3: were some hard dudes, and there was co ed too.
33:31
Speaker 3: There were some women too that were just from inner
33:33
Speaker 3: city world and just like somehow found some way to
33:36
Speaker 3: get to this camp. And it basically it was like
33:39
Speaker 3: putting you through a series of trials. You do like
33:41
Speaker 3: a week long physical intensive where there's fourteen of us
33:44
Speaker 3: and we would carry like a we had two stretchers
33:47
Speaker 3: of wilderness stretchers we had to carry that had like
33:49
Speaker 3: two hundred and fifty pounds of our gear and water
33:51
Speaker 3: and community supplies, and so seven of us would have
33:54
Speaker 3: to carry one and the other seven would carry the other.
33:55
Speaker 3: And you do I think the first day we did
33:57
Speaker 3: like less than a mile in like flat prairie of
34:02
Speaker 3: southern southeast Oregon, and then you know, kind of got
34:05
Speaker 3: our stride a little bit and we could do like,
34:06
Speaker 3: you know, six miles maybe in a day. And then
34:09
Speaker 3: you did a week long solo.
34:11
Speaker 2: What's the So I don't want to stay too long
34:15
Speaker 2: at this camp here, but what do they what's the
34:19
Speaker 2: repercussion if you don't move the stretcher? Like if you
34:21
Speaker 2: got all these if you got all these kids that
34:22
Speaker 2: are trying to like push against authority and you say,
34:25
Speaker 2: hey move, move, go, go go, what why do they
34:29
Speaker 2: why can they not say it? No?
34:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean a lot of that was part of it.
34:33
Speaker 3: Like that happened the first day where people were just
34:35
Speaker 3: like we're not doing this, like this is dumb.
34:36
Speaker 2: But then what happens when you don't.
34:38
Speaker 3: Well there's like like your your food and your kind
34:41
Speaker 3: of like the other group supplies are still ahead of
34:43
Speaker 3: you as well, so like you do kind of need
34:46
Speaker 3: there is a motivation there God, and then eventually the
34:48
Speaker 3: other like the kind of peer pressure comes in where
34:50
Speaker 3: like some of the kids are like just do it,
34:52
Speaker 3: just let's just do this, pick it up, do it,
34:54
Speaker 3: like so let's get it over with. And some kids
34:56
Speaker 3: ran away and they yeah, they would basically just like
35:00
Speaker 3: call the cops and be like, all right, this kid's
35:02
Speaker 3: running and we all knew what the consequences were if
35:04
Speaker 3: we ran all then you go to the next step.
35:07
Speaker 3: But yeah, yeah, and the next step up is like
35:09
Speaker 3: they wanted their recommendation. I was there for a month
35:12
Speaker 3: for kind of the main program, and then I was
35:14
Speaker 3: there for an extended because I didn't they felt like
35:16
Speaker 3: I didn't get the work done. I just kind of
35:17
Speaker 3: like coasted through, and they recommended to go to like
35:21
Speaker 3: the next step is these like private jails essentially for youth.
35:25
Speaker 3: They're called lockdowns. They're all over the country and they're
35:29
Speaker 3: you know, they require certain level of affluence or money
35:32
Speaker 3: to be able to go to these things because it's
35:34
Speaker 3: basically a boarding school, but you're start at the lowest
35:36
Speaker 3: level and you work way up based on behavior to
35:38
Speaker 3: more freedom. And there's some of these programs that like
35:41
Speaker 3: if you graduate from them, you can go to any
35:43
Speaker 3: college in the US because it means that you've run
35:45
Speaker 3: the gauntlet and you're like a very formed young person,
35:50
Speaker 3: a teenager. So yeah, so I I was one of
35:52
Speaker 3: the best things for me was just going to this and.
35:56
Speaker 2: That fixed that fixed it.
35:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I didn't no more failing, went to
36:00
Speaker 3: No More felonies. Yeah, and I went to like a
36:05
Speaker 3: it was a reform school essentially, like a second chance
36:08
Speaker 3: school in Northern Vermont. Afterwards, and like skip eighth grade
36:11
Speaker 3: went there. There's one other kid in my freshman class
36:14
Speaker 3: and my best friend there at the time. He had
36:18
Speaker 3: stolen cars. He grew up kind inner city and he
36:19
Speaker 3: was still in cars while we were there, and so
36:21
Speaker 3: I had all these opportunities. There were kids doing heroin
36:23
Speaker 3: in their rooms. It was stuff that I hadn't been
36:25
Speaker 3: exposed to, and I yeah, that change of being in
36:31
Speaker 3: the wild. Essentially, it was like realizing that I had
36:34
Speaker 3: no freedom. I was sent to this place and I
36:37
Speaker 3: was in trouble all the time, and all I wanted
36:39
Speaker 3: was freedom. I was like a super rowdy kid, didn't
36:41
Speaker 3: want to be indoors, didn't sit still, and so it
36:45
Speaker 3: was like, yeah, just realizing that I had to conform
36:47
Speaker 3: in some ways or at least like work within it
36:50
Speaker 3: versus like just being held against my will, which is
36:54
Speaker 3: how it was a lot of times. So yeah, that did.
36:56
Speaker 3: That absolutely fixed me.
36:57
Speaker 2: At what point you decide you're going to study biology?
37:00
Speaker 3: That was.
37:02
Speaker 2: Yeah.
37:02
Speaker 3: I went to college and decided I started out wildlife management.
37:05
Speaker 3: I switched actually graduated a business degree in like a
37:07
Speaker 3: minor and environmental conservation, and then went into wildlife biology
37:11
Speaker 3: after that.
37:12
Speaker 2: So what was your first gig in biology?
37:14
Speaker 3: First gig was doing a spotted owl surveys in Yosemite
37:18
Speaker 3: National Park. So there was a fire ecology study. Basically
37:21
Speaker 3: it was like how well the owls do in areas
37:23
Speaker 3: of burned versus unburned areas? Showed basically that there wasn't
37:28
Speaker 3: much of a change that the owls or fire adapted.
37:31
Speaker 3: But the actual work was amazing. I mean I grew
37:34
Speaker 3: up in Vermont, didn't have experience really in like the West.
37:37
Speaker 3: My dad brought me out to maybe a couple of
37:40
Speaker 3: weeks I had in the Bear twos and then win Rivers,
37:43
Speaker 3: which was amazing. So I knew, I knew what wildness
37:46
Speaker 3: and like the idea of an intact ecosystem and old
37:49
Speaker 3: growth forests and grizzlies and these places where wildness doesn't
37:54
Speaker 3: exist in New England in that way, and so being
37:56
Speaker 3: in Yosemite is like a it's a dream for that
37:59
Speaker 3: you have giants to is you have huge, unbelievable landscapes,
38:02
Speaker 3: and we were we would catch owls and ban them
38:05
Speaker 3: and monitor them throughout the throughout the summer and basically
38:09
Speaker 3: decide how many chicks they had. And that was kind
38:11
Speaker 3: of like the scope of the work. And so it
38:13
Speaker 3: would be out camping back back in for ten days
38:16
Speaker 3: on four days off.
38:17
Speaker 2: And were you into were you getting into photography at
38:20
Speaker 2: that point?
38:20
Speaker 3: That was when I bought a camera. Yeah. I bought
38:22
Speaker 3: like a used like a film camera on eBay, like
38:25
Speaker 3: a couple hundred bucks for everything, and had the idea
38:28
Speaker 3: that I would be interested in photography. I took a
38:30
Speaker 3: black and white class when I was in high school,
38:32
Speaker 3: but didn't really take to it. And it was mainly
38:36
Speaker 3: a vehicle to like photograph the wildlife and the landscapes
38:39
Speaker 3: that I was like photographed the beauty like I would
38:41
Speaker 3: if there was like a telephone pole or like a
38:43
Speaker 3: person or a car, I'd be like, there's no picture
38:47
Speaker 3: Like that was that was like I was super strict
38:49
Speaker 3: about it.
38:49
Speaker 2: You didn't want any photos touched by man. No.
38:52
Speaker 3: I just thought, Yeah, I got just enamored with with
38:55
Speaker 3: these like the idea, and I think we all experienced it,
38:58
Speaker 3: this idea of like being in a ecosystem. It's almost
39:01
Speaker 3: like being around people that have a regulated nervous system,
39:04
Speaker 3: like we have these you know, elders, I think basically
39:07
Speaker 3: people who are like you can't flap them, like they're
39:11
Speaker 3: just like solid. I think about, like, I don't know
39:14
Speaker 3: any of these old timers you've been around, who've seen
39:16
Speaker 3: the world and have been through hardships and are I
39:20
Speaker 3: think of I mean some of these religious figures or
39:25
Speaker 3: like elders that I've spent time with around Indian communities
39:27
Speaker 3: around here where they're just they speak wisdom and that's
39:31
Speaker 3: their role in life. And I think that people are
39:35
Speaker 3: drawn to that, you know, you just like when you're
39:38
Speaker 3: around that kind of a human that kind of a
39:40
Speaker 3: nervous system, you're just you're at ease, you're curious, you
39:44
Speaker 3: want to learn from them. And that's how I feel
39:46
Speaker 3: around like ecosystems that are that are intact, that haven't
39:50
Speaker 3: been changed. When I say intact, hasn't been changed by
39:53
Speaker 3: like the modern expansion of yah capitalism and machines and
39:58
Speaker 3: cutting and this idea, you know, these things where they've
40:01
Speaker 3: existed in some sort of relationship for tens of thousands
40:04
Speaker 3: of years, and that was what I wanted a photograph
40:08
Speaker 3: that's where I wanted to be and spend time in Yosemite.
40:10
Speaker 3: Was that that first introduction to that.
40:12
Speaker 2: So what was the work you did with chimps?
40:15
Speaker 3: Chimps? Yeah, there's picture we could pull up kind of
40:19
Speaker 3: towards the end, but it's a canopy photo of chimps
40:22
Speaker 3: in a in trees in Uganda.
40:25
Speaker 2: So I had a radu in one lie because there's
40:28
Speaker 2: a picture of some chimps outside of the house.
40:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, what's the lie?
40:32
Speaker 2: Because the man made Oh, well that was early.
40:35
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, yeah, early I was still experimenting. Yeah,
40:39
Speaker 3: I mean it showed you my high tech hobo camp. Yeah. Oh.
40:43
Speaker 3: My relationship to photography has changed a lot.
40:45
Speaker 2: Around what is that?
40:46
Speaker 3: That is a picture of chimps up in a canopy?
40:50
Speaker 2: So what country were in here?
40:52
Speaker 3: This is Uganda. So twenty eleven I had an opportunity
40:55
Speaker 3: to work as a field researcher for Kibali Chimpanzee Project
41:01
Speaker 3: and they wanted me to use photography as the tool
41:04
Speaker 3: of photo video to basically create imagery around behaviors and
41:09
Speaker 3: so capturing from behaviors to create a catalog to better
41:11
Speaker 3: understand chimp behavior.
41:13
Speaker 2: And so we're looking here at a picture. We're kind
41:15
Speaker 2: of up in the canopy over I can't tell if
41:18
Speaker 2: we're in rainforest, but over a heavy forest. We're upping
41:22
Speaker 2: the canopy and it's like a tree of very convoluted
41:25
Speaker 2: crotches and limbs. And if you kind of look throughout
41:29
Speaker 2: the tree, you're looking at not quite a dozen, but
41:31
Speaker 2: a lot of chimps scattered around. What are they doing
41:35
Speaker 2: up there? Grabbing something to eat?
41:36
Speaker 3: Yeah? This is a cool tree. Is a big fig tree.
41:38
Speaker 3: We're on the equator. It's temperate, but it's rainforest at
41:42
Speaker 3: about a little over four thousand feet so it's a
41:45
Speaker 3: beautiful one of the most productive forests in the world.
41:48
Speaker 3: There's huge volcanic activity around here, and the soil is
41:51
Speaker 3: unbelievably fertile.
41:52
Speaker 2: And this tree, this fig tree, well, now that I'm looking,
41:55
Speaker 2: I see it's just that.
41:57
Speaker 4: Isn't that crazy?
41:59
Speaker 3: This is a called Ficus capensus And for the listeners,
42:03
Speaker 3: a lot of fig trees and fruiting trees. They'll grow
42:06
Speaker 3: like kind of apple trees oranges, where the fruits are
42:08
Speaker 3: at the end of the canopy, the extension of the
42:11
Speaker 3: crown where the leaves are. This fig tree, the lea
42:16
Speaker 3: figs grow in bunches like grapes like, and they're huge.
42:20
Speaker 3: And so this tree would fruit for maybe three weeks
42:24
Speaker 3: once or twice a year, and it would just be
42:26
Speaker 3: mecca for this group of chimps. And this was part
42:30
Speaker 3: of what I was asked to do, was climb the
42:32
Speaker 3: trees and photograph them from the chimps with tree climbing gear.
42:36
Speaker 3: Tree climbing gear. Yea, I had that pictures set not
42:39
Speaker 3: in this deck, but it I was there, yeah physically there. Yeah,
42:46
Speaker 3: So that was all. Yeah, so these chimps, well, that's
42:49
Speaker 3: an incredible picture there. Yeah, what's that dude got in
42:51
Speaker 3: his hand? This picture is of a group of female
42:55
Speaker 3: chimps in the process of tearing apart the remains of
42:59
Speaker 3: a call up his monkey God. So this is stepping
43:03
Speaker 3: into some of the cool similarities that we share with
43:08
Speaker 3: with chimps. Chimps are territorial social apes, just like we are.
43:12
Speaker 3: We are territorial social apes, and we hunt and it's cultural,
43:16
Speaker 3: so you know, we are. I like to think of
43:18
Speaker 3: every human as born as a hunter, and it's just
43:21
Speaker 3: a matter of how their nature is nurtured. Do we
43:24
Speaker 3: get nurtured into hunting or not? And chimps are the
43:27
Speaker 3: same way. So certain groups of chimps hunt a lot
43:30
Speaker 3: and certain groups don't. This community that I was with,
43:32
Speaker 3: they're habituated. They've been studied for thirty years, so I
43:34
Speaker 3: could follow them. Your question earlier about them being easeful
43:37
Speaker 3: in the canopy is because they're studied and most of
43:39
Speaker 3: the chimps have been around humans pretty much their whole life.
43:42
Speaker 2: So is what they're holding on to there that's a
43:44
Speaker 2: dead monkey.
43:44
Speaker 3: That's a dead monkey, and the part.
43:46
Speaker 2: Of him that looks all gnawed on. Yeah, what's that part.
43:51
Speaker 3: That's the part of the vertebrae poking through So it's
43:54
Speaker 3: been broken.
43:54
Speaker 2: Well, so you happen to just catch it where you
43:56
Speaker 2: can't see where he's ripped apart.
43:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, so this is this went on for maybe thirty minutes.
44:02
Speaker 3: I saw the initial hunt they kill. It's it's super coordinated,
44:07
Speaker 3: really interesting. So they'll be they will go hunting like
44:12
Speaker 3: they will like me and Randall, you and Randall head.
44:15
Speaker 3: Now I've heard you speak to it too, Like when
44:17
Speaker 3: you're in the natural world, you like to speak quietly.
44:19
Speaker 3: You like to move like we move, You move differently
44:21
Speaker 3: when you're hunting. The chimps will do that too, so
44:23
Speaker 3: you'll suddenly realize that, like, oh, they're in hunting mode.
44:27
Speaker 3: And they do that either to go hunt monkeys or
44:29
Speaker 3: they do that when they go border patrolling to the
44:31
Speaker 3: edge of their territory where they could bump into another community.
44:34
Speaker 2: Border patrol quiet.
44:35
Speaker 3: They border patrol quiet. Yeah, And they do stuff where
44:38
Speaker 3: they you know, they knuckle walk and they walk on
44:41
Speaker 3: the back pads of their feet and they'll be walking
44:44
Speaker 3: and you'll see them do like the like pause where
44:47
Speaker 3: like one foots up, one hands up where they're like, yeah,
44:50
Speaker 3: were they listening, and the other chimps know like, oh,
44:52
Speaker 3: I gotta listen. Yeah. It's just like a pointer where
44:54
Speaker 3: they're trying to just basically like key into something and
44:56
Speaker 3: pay attention and listen.
44:58
Speaker 2: And so when they go, let's take the border patrol thing, Yeah,
45:03
Speaker 2: it is a certain time a day. What's the cadence
45:08
Speaker 2: to it?
45:09
Speaker 3: It's not so the community that I was with they
45:13
Speaker 3: I'd only been border patrolling with them a few times,
45:16
Speaker 3: and one of the times was they were going to
45:19
Speaker 3: their to their border, and this border was the border
45:23
Speaker 3: with like the human world. It's the edge of their
45:26
Speaker 3: National Park range where they live, this community of chimps
45:30
Speaker 3: national park on three sides. There's a next picture here
45:33
Speaker 3: that does show like the actual border, and we don't
45:36
Speaker 3: have to talk to the bottom picture where we can
45:37
Speaker 3: speak to the top picture there. So you see just
45:39
Speaker 3: a very hard line between the So I'm with this
45:43
Speaker 3: group of chimps and they're going out on this So.
45:45
Speaker 2: What we're looking at is like a big block of
45:48
Speaker 2: forest with a very hard line where it goes into
45:50
Speaker 2: open cut.
45:52
Speaker 4: Looks like you're flying over the Midwest.
45:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, looking at where the woodlot butts up to the hayfield. Yeah.
45:58
Speaker 3: I have actually a picture of this that I just
45:59
Speaker 3: made weeks ago in Wisconsin. That's like the same idea,
46:03
Speaker 3: but it's the Monominee Indian reservation and agriculture next time
46:07
Speaker 3: of it. This idea of these lines between like the
46:11
Speaker 3: wild world and quote human dominated world. So they're going
46:15
Speaker 3: to patrol that, they're going to the edge of that,
46:16
Speaker 3: and they're going to the edge of that to look
46:17
Speaker 3: for crops. They're going to crop rate. But it's the
46:20
Speaker 3: same behavior where they don't want to be seen. They
46:22
Speaker 3: know they're doing something kind of naughty God, and they
46:24
Speaker 3: don't want to get seen by people. And so we're
46:26
Speaker 3: going out. It's three males that I'm with. They were
46:29
Speaker 3: all named It was Johnny, Big Brown and Stout. Stout
46:32
Speaker 3: was like in his sixties. He was like this legendary
46:34
Speaker 3: old in his sixties. Chimp's gonna live to be the
46:36
Speaker 3: sixties in the wild. They can live to the eighties
46:38
Speaker 3: in captivity. And so they're out moving. Johnny's up front
46:42
Speaker 3: and they just run a trail and it's just me,
46:44
Speaker 3: the only human with them, and they veer into the
46:46
Speaker 3: thick brush and I'm confused why they're doing that, and
46:49
Speaker 3: I my job is to follow them to see what
46:51
Speaker 3: they're up to. So I'm on my hands and he's
46:52
Speaker 3: crawling in trying to get close to them and see
46:54
Speaker 3: what they're doing. I get up to them. The three
46:56
Speaker 3: of them are just sitting next to each other, just
46:57
Speaker 3: like just chilling. They're not doing anything, which is confusing.
47:01
Speaker 3: Like it's mid morning, and I sit with them. A
47:04
Speaker 3: couple minutes go by, and then I hear human voices.
47:07
Speaker 2: How close can you sit with them?
47:09
Speaker 3: Met you? What do you wear a little further, just
47:12
Speaker 3: like crappy clothes. I got out of market in town
47:15
Speaker 3: because they're gonna get torn up by vines and jungle,
47:18
Speaker 3: so I got pants and just like a long sleeve
47:20
Speaker 3: shirt and a backpack just like food and water.
47:22
Speaker 4: For that, they've like accepted you as yeah, I mean
47:25
Speaker 4: the presence in their.
47:26
Speaker 3: Yeah, they've accepted me because they've been habituated by researchers
47:31
Speaker 3: for the thirty years prior.
47:32
Speaker 2: They ignore you or there they acknowledge you.
47:35
Speaker 3: I mean, that's the interesting thing about this situation where
47:37
Speaker 3: I've only been there for like a month, and so
47:39
Speaker 3: they didn't really know me, but I came with people
47:43
Speaker 3: that they know, and they recognize faces better than we do.
47:46
Speaker 3: Like chimp facial recognition is it's better than our essentially,
47:50
Speaker 3: but you know, they that's because again territorial social animals,
47:54
Speaker 3: we need to be able to recognize very quickly friend
47:56
Speaker 3: or foe, and chims do that instantly too, and so
47:58
Speaker 3: they recognize human faces. And so they why I was cool,
48:00
Speaker 3: just because I came with the other guys who were cool,
48:03
Speaker 3: and so I'm with them, and I realized that they're
48:07
Speaker 3: hiding from these people. And now I'm also hiding from
48:10
Speaker 3: these people, not intentionally, but these chimps are essentially like, Okay,
48:16
Speaker 3: you're cool, but these guys we don't know. We don't
48:18
Speaker 3: know who these people are. And so I'm in the
48:19
Speaker 3: bushes and.
48:20
Speaker 2: They had heard them, they heard them before I did,
48:22
Speaker 2: and they're just waiting their more key out.
48:23
Speaker 3: There's waiting it out. And so these guys come into view.
48:25
Speaker 3: They have no idea where they're They passed by completely
48:27
Speaker 3: unaware the whole time, and I'm just sitting there next
48:29
Speaker 3: to the chimps.
48:30
Speaker 2: Do the chimps hold tight when they're hiding.
48:32
Speaker 3: Yep, they hold tight. They just watched they knew what
48:33
Speaker 3: they were doing.
48:34
Speaker 2: Yep, not turning their heads real fast or no.
48:37
Speaker 3: No, And they're chill about it, like they they know
48:39
Speaker 3: they can get up a tree and move if they
48:41
Speaker 3: needed to. God, oh yeah, that's a good point. But
48:43
Speaker 3: it was very much like they're on.
48:45
Speaker 2: It doesn't feel life or death to them.
48:46
Speaker 3: They they just rather go unnoticed. They just didn't want
48:49
Speaker 3: to like they want to carry on their day and
48:51
Speaker 3: not get scolded for potentially going the crop rating is
48:54
Speaker 3: what seemed like they were doing, so that that border
48:56
Speaker 3: patrol mentality, that was kind of what they were up to.
48:59
Speaker 3: And then they got to the edge of the floor
49:00
Speaker 3: forest looked out across mainly there's a tea plantation in
49:02
Speaker 3: this photo that you can see, which is a big,
49:04
Speaker 3: kind of lighter green patch of cash crop that they use.
49:07
Speaker 3: And they walked along that border for maybe a quarter mile,
49:10
Speaker 3: realizing that it's not a food for them, and they
49:13
Speaker 3: went back into the forest.
49:14
Speaker 2: If you got in a fight war them, he's gonna
49:16
Speaker 2: beat your ass.
49:17
Speaker 3: M oh Man, Yeah, I mean chimps. Roughly it's like
49:20
Speaker 3: five times our strength. Their bone density is roughly like
49:25
Speaker 3: twice as dense. Their skin is much tougher, so cool.
49:29
Speaker 3: In fact, we're the only apes that float.
49:33
Speaker 2: They'll sink.
49:34
Speaker 3: The rest of the apes flow sink, and so that
49:37
Speaker 3: tells you a lot about like density strength, muscle, fiber density,
49:41
Speaker 3: like all this. We traded kind of that robust ability
49:44
Speaker 3: to climb trees and be super burly for locomotion and
49:49
Speaker 3: so like one of these chimps people watched him. I
49:51
Speaker 3: wasn't there for it. He fell eighty feet to the
49:53
Speaker 3: deck out of a tree and like ran off into
49:56
Speaker 3: the woods and then came back a couple of days
49:59
Speaker 3: later and was like like a little limp or something,
50:01
Speaker 3: but was all right. Yeah, they would mess you up.
50:04
Speaker 3: There's there's stories I read about of like I don't
50:07
Speaker 3: on the twenties and gonna have these like weird like
50:09
Speaker 3: traveling shows side show things that would go to like
50:12
Speaker 3: county fairs and things, and they'd be like the pin
50:14
Speaker 3: the Chimp game. Oh yeah, and they have a chimp
50:18
Speaker 3: where they're like I think that they took they trim
50:20
Speaker 3: the clawsway down or like yeah, basically file them way
50:23
Speaker 3: off and then take the canines out.
50:25
Speaker 2: And then you got and they mix it up with him.
50:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then there'd be a dude I think they
50:28
Speaker 3: probably must. They probably have to take his all of
50:30
Speaker 3: his teeth out, because chimps their move is they they
50:34
Speaker 3: do they just take they glove you, they take your
50:36
Speaker 3: fingers off, and for men, they rip off your balls.
50:39
Speaker 5: Yeah, I've seen footage of the uh, just let that
50:44
Speaker 5: one slide. I've seen footage of like a border patrol
50:47
Speaker 5: where they encounter another group of chimps and they rip
50:52
Speaker 5: they rip the males genitals off and they basically rip
50:54
Speaker 5: them limb from lim yeap, and it's like it's like
50:59
Speaker 5: something it's like a monster out of a movie. Like
51:01
Speaker 5: you think about the strength that would require to just
51:03
Speaker 5: pull the limb off of another animal of your same south,
51:06
Speaker 5: to pull the sack off a guy that.
51:10
Speaker 2: I mean, that would help us like you know, breaking
51:12
Speaker 2: down deer and stuff in the field.
51:15
Speaker 3: Like chip strength.
51:20
Speaker 2: So let's talk about when they set out to go hunt.
51:23
Speaker 2: They there's a there's a there's a there's a hunt
51:28
Speaker 2: leader I'm assuming, and he strikes off he knows where
51:31
Speaker 2: he's going.
51:33
Speaker 3: Yeah, it they will. So the group that I was with,
51:36
Speaker 3: they didn't hunt that much, maybe like once a month.
51:40
Speaker 3: There's and that's all based on like it's culturally based
51:44
Speaker 3: it's based, so it's a learned behavior that's passed down.
51:47
Speaker 3: It's not something that like all chimp groups don't necessarily
51:50
Speaker 3: hunt just because they can. And then it's around like energy,
51:55
Speaker 3: So how much fruit are they getting outside of their diet,
51:59
Speaker 3: because makes a lot of energy to hunt for the
52:01
Speaker 3: meat takes a lot of like physical energy to move
52:03
Speaker 3: and to catch the monkeys that are fast. And so
52:06
Speaker 3: there's another community south of the one that I was
52:09
Speaker 3: spent most of my time in called in Gogo and
52:11
Speaker 3: it's this famous community. There's a documentary called Chimp Empire
52:15
Speaker 3: Fantastic on Netflix. It focuses on that site. These researchers
52:19
Speaker 3: have spent forty years studying that. And to your question
52:22
Speaker 3: around like hunt Leader, there was these like couple guys,
52:27
Speaker 3: a couple of chimps who are They just love to hunt.
52:30
Speaker 3: They like to go border but they like to hunt
52:32
Speaker 3: monkeys or chimps. That was like their deal. They didn't
52:34
Speaker 3: really care much about socializing in the hierarchy of other chimps.
52:37
Speaker 3: They were just like, when we get together, we're going
52:40
Speaker 3: to do some stuff. And they that community was the
52:42
Speaker 3: biggest known chimp community.
52:44
Speaker 2: It was like and it could have been just driven
52:46
Speaker 2: by the personality of a couple of the animals.
52:49
Speaker 3: Personality a couple of animals built like abundance too. So
52:52
Speaker 3: there's a lot of monkeys in their home range. It's worthwhile,
52:54
Speaker 3: so it's worthwhile, and there's opportunity, and there's opportunity to learn,
52:58
Speaker 3: and so they they do these like coordinated hunts where yeah,
53:02
Speaker 3: you got the leader. They head out, they're going, they
53:05
Speaker 3: start to look up. They're trying to like listen, and
53:07
Speaker 3: the monkeys know, and so they'll they'll often get quiet,
53:09
Speaker 3: the monkeys will, but then they'll be they'll send up
53:13
Speaker 3: kind of these like beaters, let's call them. They're like
53:17
Speaker 3: little smaller chimps. Maybe they'll go up, younger chimps that
53:20
Speaker 3: still know what to do, and they'll kind of try
53:21
Speaker 3: to flush them. Some of the big males that go
53:23
Speaker 3: up too.
53:23
Speaker 2: So they hear they hear or see another monkey aet
53:26
Speaker 2: working in a tree yep. And not the big dudes,
53:30
Speaker 2: but some other dudes.
53:32
Speaker 3: Sometimes the big dudes will go up and they would.
53:35
Speaker 2: Like, how would do you have any idea how they
53:39
Speaker 2: how to be conveyed? Like, hey, you go up there?
53:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's just I think it's just instinctual.
53:45
Speaker 3: I think it's like I think it's lost on us,
53:48
Speaker 3: and I think that there's I think it's like in
53:50
Speaker 3: those moments where when you're working in group, like there
53:53
Speaker 3: is some of that intuition that comes through where you're like, oh,
53:56
Speaker 3: this is I'm going to take this lead on this
53:58
Speaker 3: situation here.
53:59
Speaker 2: So you're never able to detect a decision. You wouldn't
54:03
Speaker 2: know what to look for.
54:05
Speaker 3: Decisions get made. I mean they look to each other,
54:08
Speaker 3: you know, it's kind of like like they gaze fall,
54:11
Speaker 3: they look to each other, they look up. If one's
54:12
Speaker 3: looking up, they'll look too. Like think of like dogs
54:15
Speaker 3: that look to you really quickly to make a decision.
54:18
Speaker 3: That happens. I've seen it in all social mammals where
54:20
Speaker 3: it's like they look quickly to the more experienced ones
54:23
Speaker 3: and they make a decision. In trouble with wolves, seen
54:27
Speaker 3: it with chimps with gorillas, And in this situation, you know,
54:31
Speaker 3: it gets pretty crazy quick where you have chimps going
54:34
Speaker 3: up the trees. You have monkeys screaming and running and
54:38
Speaker 3: through the trees that break neck speed, and they often
54:41
Speaker 3: try to get to like the ends of the branch
54:42
Speaker 3: that are thinner you have you have chimps that are
54:45
Speaker 3: breaking and lunging. I mean it's like these guys are
54:48
Speaker 3: chimps are unbelievable athletes of course, and they can jump
54:51
Speaker 3: and fly through the trees in a way that is
54:53
Speaker 3: just kind of terrifying to watch.
54:55
Speaker 2: And sometimes those little monkeys would know get out where
54:57
Speaker 2: there's they'll try on something that they can support.
55:01
Speaker 3: But the chimps will even just jump jump and like
55:04
Speaker 3: jump these big gaps. And a lot of times I
55:07
Speaker 3: saw where the chimps would grab a monkey and then
55:09
Speaker 3: chuck them down and then there'd be other chimps below,
55:12
Speaker 3: and then it's like then they would they would deal
55:14
Speaker 3: with them then, and really, yeah, so they would like
55:18
Speaker 3: because the monkeys are formidable, you know, like they have
55:20
Speaker 3: pretty big teeth of males, and they'll defend females as
55:23
Speaker 3: well the male yep, throw them down. Yep. Yeah, I
55:28
Speaker 3: love this so much.
55:30
Speaker 2: The primate guy, big ape guy guy, Oh yeah, never
55:34
Speaker 2: told me that it can't be that big ape guy.
55:36
Speaker 3: Well, it just doesn't come up with you.
55:38
Speaker 2: Listen, if you were a big ape guy. I'd heard
55:40
Speaker 2: about it.
55:41
Speaker 3: Phil, I I can support Phil.
55:44
Speaker 2: Had dinner with Phil, Had dinner with hit Listen. Here's
55:47
Speaker 2: what I know.
55:48
Speaker 3: You're lying.
55:49
Speaker 2: I heard you guys had lunch, yes so I come
55:52
Speaker 2: to Phil yesterday. Uh huh, I said, Phil, what'd you
55:55
Speaker 2: guys talk about lunch? Guess what he said wasn't apes? Said,
55:58
Speaker 2: you guys talked about the TV program we did about
56:01
Speaker 2: chairs the chair company.
56:05
Speaker 3: Just check it out.
56:06
Speaker 2: So apes didn't come up during yesterday's lunch, Steve.
56:11
Speaker 3: But they have come up multiple I can show you.
56:13
Speaker 4: I can show you tons of ape images on my phone.
56:16
Speaker 5: Big granitang guy, Big gorilla guy, big chimp guy, give
56:21
Speaker 5: me not so much?
56:22
Speaker 2: Monkeys rint you were? I don't know if i'd heard that.
56:26
Speaker 4: I've got pictures. They're buying glass of course, but real
56:31
Speaker 4: big ape guy. Yeah, no, I love this guy, Ape guy,
56:34
Speaker 4: steak guy.
56:36
Speaker 5: One of my dreams, Guy, one of my dreams is
56:38
Speaker 5: to go watch apes in the wild. One of my
56:41
Speaker 5: wildest dreams. You're sitting next to the right guys.
56:43
Speaker 4: I know, I know that's what I'm saying. I'm I'm
56:46
Speaker 4: all fired up about this. I love it. Okay, amazing
56:49
Speaker 4: Chimp Vmpire, Chimp crazy.
56:51
Speaker 3: Yeah, you see so good.
56:53
Speaker 2: You've got a shirt with a big monkey on it.
56:55
Speaker 2: Rantal or a big.
56:57
Speaker 4: Monkeys have tails. Sorry, I have several sits like.
57:02
Speaker 2: Entry level ape information.
57:03
Speaker 4: Yeah, I have several shirts.
57:05
Speaker 5: I have one with a big male orangutan, I have
57:08
Speaker 5: one with a juvenile orangutan, and then I have another
57:11
Speaker 5: one that's a gorilla.
57:12
Speaker 4: But it's more cartoonish. It's less photorealistic than my rangutan shirts.
57:15
Speaker 2: Sound like an ape, Yeah, sounds like he's the biggest
57:18
Speaker 2: state sale guy.
57:19
Speaker 3: Okay, renaissance man. Some people say.
57:23
Speaker 2: Dogs the state sales and apes.
57:28
Speaker 4: Life is meant to be enjoyed.
57:29
Speaker 5: Why shy away from your childish and you know, impulses
57:32
Speaker 5: and attractions.
57:34
Speaker 4: I think apes are fascinating.
57:36
Speaker 2: I want to get to white wolves and muskox's. Let's
57:38
Speaker 2: talk them about the chimps when they catch it. Well,
57:42
Speaker 2: here's another question I got about this. Is it partially
57:48
Speaker 2: competition the desire for them to kill the monkeys, Like
57:52
Speaker 2: you know how wolves they run into coyot. If they
57:54
Speaker 2: can get them, they're going to get them, because why
57:57
Speaker 2: have him running around, you know, like, why have another
57:59
Speaker 2: guy out there killing stuff?
58:02
Speaker 3: I think it's I think it's taste, Like I think
58:04
Speaker 3: it is both like the taste for meat and also
58:09
Speaker 3: they go for like the intestines and the undigested plant matter,
58:12
Speaker 3: like kind of like neon green plant matter.
58:14
Speaker 2: So they kind of relish it.
58:16
Speaker 3: I think they Yeah, I think that they seek it out.
58:18
Speaker 3: I think it is like a preference thing.
58:20
Speaker 2: I think, now, how to what degree do they do
58:23
Speaker 2: they eat it?
58:24
Speaker 3: Because like the competition thing, just to button that up.
58:26
Speaker 3: I think it's like there's so much food, Like equatorial
58:29
Speaker 3: jungle monkeys eat leaves and also fruits, but it's like
58:34
Speaker 3: chimps can dominate the fruiting tree all day long. God,
58:38
Speaker 3: and like that tree that I was in in the
58:40
Speaker 3: previous picture, almost no monkeys came to it. Like a
58:43
Speaker 3: few they.
58:44
Speaker 2: Want it, they get it, they get it.
58:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, And I think it's kind of like maybe
58:47
Speaker 3: you can think of it as like grizzly bears around
58:49
Speaker 3: here versus brown bears up in coastal Alaska, where it's
58:53
Speaker 3: like they don't fight too much about territory. There's so
58:56
Speaker 3: much abundance. I think it was so I think the
58:59
Speaker 3: hunting that to do is mostly around preference for meat.
59:03
Speaker 3: And I mean it is obviously a great source of
59:06
Speaker 3: nutrients and protein and fats, and so the breakdown of
59:10
Speaker 3: like the animal you're asking, like what they do.
59:12
Speaker 2: So they'll really just bone.
59:14
Speaker 3: No, they'll they'll kind of be scraps, like hide scraps.
59:17
Speaker 3: That that female monkey that was in the picture, she
59:20
Speaker 3: was pretty well cleaned up. And so this is the
59:25
Speaker 3: female chimps that got this. Afterwards, and the males they
59:28
Speaker 3: go for the choice meets the organs, they'll go for
59:30
Speaker 3: the intestines like I mentioned, lungs, liver, brain, to they'll
59:35
Speaker 3: crack open the skull.
59:36
Speaker 2: How did they get into that school? They just they
59:39
Speaker 2: can bite their way into it.
59:40
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, So like that's the cool thing about chimps,
59:43
Speaker 3: like human evolution. I don't know. There's a book called
59:46
Speaker 3: Catching Fire. Richard Rangan, who's the man that I was
59:48
Speaker 3: doing this research for. He was at Harvard for his career.
59:51
Speaker 3: He studied energy and goodall. He has a great book
59:53
Speaker 3: called Catching Fire that is about like how cooking made
59:56
Speaker 3: us that work, yeah, and that the softness of our
1:00:04
Speaker 3: food now allows us to we gave up all this
1:00:06
Speaker 3: bite force basically. So like chimps, a lot of predators,
1:00:09
Speaker 3: you know, have like sagital crest that you know, ridge
1:00:12
Speaker 3: on the top of their skull that muscles attached to
1:00:14
Speaker 3: so they can have a massive bite force. Chimps have that.
1:00:17
Speaker 3: A lot of apes have that. We don't. Our jaw
1:00:20
Speaker 3: muscles go up just kind of like around our temple
1:00:22
Speaker 3: if you just like clench your jaw, you can just
1:00:23
Speaker 3: feel it abovey temple. Chimps john amost to go up
1:00:26
Speaker 3: top so they can just like, yeah, they can mau
1:00:28
Speaker 3: a skull if they need to go and chewing for
1:00:31
Speaker 3: you know, six hours a day or something like that.
1:00:33
Speaker 3: And so they will pull out organs and you know,
1:00:37
Speaker 3: monkeys are alive for a lot of it. Not a
1:00:39
Speaker 3: lot of it, but like the beginning to be a
1:00:41
Speaker 3: couple of minutes in and this scene was. I photographed
1:00:45
Speaker 3: a bunch of images leading up to this, but this
1:00:47
Speaker 3: is the one that kind of shows a lot about
1:00:50
Speaker 3: the behavior and the intensity of it.
1:00:51
Speaker 2: Now that they use that image because you can't see
1:00:54
Speaker 2: that he's all ripped up.
1:00:58
Speaker 3: No, this was in like a wild Lifetography the year
1:01:00
Speaker 3: competition that it won one of the commended awards a
1:01:03
Speaker 3: few years ago.
1:01:04
Speaker 4: This is a surreal image and.
1:01:07
Speaker 3: No, I think it's like the other images are kind
1:01:10
Speaker 3: of it's a group of chimps sitting around. There's a
1:01:12
Speaker 3: monkey in the middle, and it's like a little more
1:01:15
Speaker 3: like quieter of a scene. This one has some of
1:01:17
Speaker 3: that energy. There's a motion, there's obviously like hands touching
1:01:21
Speaker 3: the monkey hands in a way. That female on the
1:01:23
Speaker 3: right is obviously warning and having a conversation with the
1:01:27
Speaker 3: chimp on the other side there. So I think that
1:01:29
Speaker 3: this image to me, just brings a lot of the
1:01:32
Speaker 3: energy to the scene in a way that some of
1:01:34
Speaker 3: the other images didn't necessarily.
1:01:36
Speaker 4: The canines on that oh yeah, the chimps.
1:01:39
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:01:40
Speaker 2: So is that that monkey's tail sticking out?
1:01:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's flapping down almost like it's just like it's
1:01:47
Speaker 3: sighing it together, and they tore it apart after this,
1:01:52
Speaker 3: like it was in two pieces pretty quickly.
1:01:54
Speaker 5: Is the bottom right like guts or a prolapsed anus?
1:02:00
Speaker 4: Yeah?
1:02:01
Speaker 3: On the female yeah, and the she's in a swelling state,
1:02:06
Speaker 3: so she's like an estuous. I think it's like a
1:02:08
Speaker 3: little it's not not part of that perfect, not part
1:02:11
Speaker 3: of that. No, No, that's just they get a visual sign.
1:02:15
Speaker 3: A lot of apes get a visual sign and primates
1:02:17
Speaker 3: in general of when females are in estrous.
1:02:19
Speaker 2: Did you ever hear that argument? This is a good one.
1:02:21
Speaker 3: Man.
1:02:21
Speaker 2: Did you ever hear the argument that one of the
1:02:23
Speaker 2: things that leads to human monogamy and permanent occupation between
1:02:31
Speaker 2: a breeding male and female human is that there's no
1:02:34
Speaker 2: outward display. There's no outward display, so you have to
1:02:39
Speaker 2: always be around interesting. You can't time a male can't
1:02:44
Speaker 2: time is comings and goings like you got to stick around,
1:02:48
Speaker 2: be there, present. There's no outward display. Other and other
1:02:51
Speaker 2: males can't wouldn't look and know they can't look at
1:02:56
Speaker 2: a human female and know that she's an estress. Does
1:03:00
Speaker 2: it make you uncomfortably talked about like a beast? No? Okay, good,
1:03:04
Speaker 2: those things don't bother me, you know me.
1:03:07
Speaker 4: Like a beast.
1:03:09
Speaker 3: That's a good book, Sex at Dawn that just analyzes
1:03:13
Speaker 3: like the human sexual relationship.
1:03:15
Speaker 2: From like why that's a favorite Rick. We talked about
1:03:19
Speaker 2: Rick Smith earlier. Remember one day we were talking about
1:03:21
Speaker 2: all this and Rick Smith said human, he was he
1:03:25
Speaker 2: was talking about humans. Rick Alay likes talking about humans
1:03:27
Speaker 2: like he's describing a wild animal. And he said, we're
1:03:32
Speaker 2: monogamous mostly, we're a monogamous species mostly. Yeah, we strive
1:03:41
Speaker 2: toward it. There's a strong pull toward it. Yeah, you know, yeah,
1:03:46
Speaker 2: I think with chimps. I mean it's like they're not
1:03:49
Speaker 2: at all.
1:03:49
Speaker 3: I mean most not monogamous. No, most apes aren't, and
1:03:55
Speaker 3: most primates aren't, but they will do they'll do these
1:03:57
Speaker 3: things called like concertships where they're like male hiring fe
1:04:01
Speaker 3: male not even always hiring, but he'll try to like
1:04:04
Speaker 3: build a relationship with a female and then when she's
1:04:07
Speaker 3: at her peak cycle esteris, they'll like move out and
1:04:12
Speaker 3: go kind of like hide for a couple of weeks, huh,
1:04:15
Speaker 3: and just be gone from the rest of the group.
1:04:17
Speaker 3: And then the rest of the males kind of lose
1:04:18
Speaker 3: their mind and try to find them. But most of
1:04:20
Speaker 3: the times you do, yeah, yep, they'll go on patrol.
1:04:23
Speaker 2: And why do they want to find.
1:04:24
Speaker 3: Him because they want to breathe, they want to read her. Yeah,
1:04:27
Speaker 3: I mean the females, they want to be with every
1:04:29
Speaker 3: male possible, like a.
1:04:32
Speaker 2: Oh home, I got mixed up. I thought you said
1:04:34
Speaker 2: the male takes off.
1:04:36
Speaker 3: Yes, he'll take off with the female.
1:04:38
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, and head out throwing me off. He splits
1:04:43
Speaker 2: and leaves the female.
1:04:44
Speaker 3: No, No, he'll he'll convince her coercor either by her
1:04:48
Speaker 3: will or sometimes not necessarily, to like go off and
1:04:51
Speaker 3: be just with him for how far off a mile
1:04:56
Speaker 3: or something like that, like Jim Homemane is not that big.
1:04:58
Speaker 3: But that's that's rare. Most of the time, it's like, yeah,
1:05:00
Speaker 3: it's the top males, but they'll share. It's not like
1:05:04
Speaker 3: the male will dominated the reading.
1:05:08
Speaker 2: So they don't have a lot of certainty about parentage.
1:05:10
Speaker 3: They have no known paternity. Okay, yeah, yeah.
1:05:16
Speaker 2: This so this picture, which is stunning. You did not
1:05:19
Speaker 2: take this as a professional photographer. You took this as
1:05:22
Speaker 2: a researcher.
1:05:23
Speaker 3: Yes, correct.
1:05:24
Speaker 2: And then when you finished this, did you say, I'm
1:05:27
Speaker 2: not a researcher, I'm now a photographer.
1:05:30
Speaker 3: No, I I I mean I always had aspiration to
1:05:34
Speaker 3: be a photographer.
1:05:35
Speaker 2: You did, Okay, yeah, so you at this time you
1:05:37
Speaker 2: recognized photography as a thing.
1:05:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, I did. I want it, and I didn't know
1:05:40
Speaker 3: I didn't know what my like, I didn't know how
1:05:42
Speaker 3: to tell stories like I would just go for like
1:05:45
Speaker 3: one off pictures. You know. I got obsessed with obsessed
1:05:48
Speaker 3: with photograph and waterfowl and build like a floating blind
1:05:51
Speaker 3: and like get at their level and just photograph all
1:05:53
Speaker 3: kinds of cool waterfowl around Montana. But didn't ever do
1:05:56
Speaker 3: anything with those images and with this after this project,
1:06:00
Speaker 3: the research that I was working for Richard Rangham, he
1:06:03
Speaker 3: knew a photographer named Tim Layman who was also a
1:06:07
Speaker 3: researcher turned photographer. He also did canopy work. He worked
1:06:09
Speaker 3: for National Geographic and sent Tim some of these pictures
1:06:13
Speaker 3: and Tim was like, yeah, you should show these National Geographic.
1:06:16
Speaker 3: Here's the name of the editor, Kathy Moran. Here's an email,
1:06:19
Speaker 3: here's like two sentences attached to pictures, and then a
1:06:22
Speaker 3: gallery linked to maybe like thirty images. And then wait,
1:06:25
Speaker 3: so that was yeah, that was like twenty eleven. And
1:06:27
Speaker 3: so when I spent the year living in Uganda photographing
1:06:29
Speaker 3: the chimps for research, and then there was a couple
1:06:32
Speaker 3: of years in between. I worked for like a production
1:06:38
Speaker 3: company out of the Midwest with a guy named Jeff
1:06:40
Speaker 3: Simpson who's like a he was like a white tail
1:06:43
Speaker 3: hunter for a long time, like a Sitka athlete whatever
1:06:47
Speaker 3: whatever they call them, and.
1:06:48
Speaker 2: You took pictures of deer.
1:06:50
Speaker 3: I did like such like sponsored content videos with like
1:06:54
Speaker 3: Corey Jacobson and like Jim Old Junior and Jonathan Hart
1:06:57
Speaker 3: who was one of the co founders of Sitka, and
1:07:00
Speaker 3: so just go and film. It was like big game archery,
1:07:02
Speaker 3: hunts god, and that was my first like actual paid
1:07:05
Speaker 3: kind of like film wildlife job. It was both to
1:07:08
Speaker 3: learn huntings. I didn't grow up with it and I
1:07:09
Speaker 3: was curious, and then it was also to kind of
1:07:12
Speaker 3: hone my chops with So that was after this, after this, Yeah,
1:07:17
Speaker 3: they had to seem pretty like pretty tame the people.
1:07:21
Speaker 2: No, I mean just the whole get up after coming
1:07:22
Speaker 2: out of Uganda a year and Uganda, yeah, chasing shimps.
1:07:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was hard to come home in a lot
1:07:27
Speaker 3: of ways. Like the life there was pretty it was
1:07:30
Speaker 3: pretty amazing. I mean I lived in a research camp.
1:07:32
Speaker 3: You hear elephants at night. Then you would just put
1:07:36
Speaker 3: on your backpack and go out for the day and
1:07:38
Speaker 3: like follow chimps and see new things every day. I'm
1:07:42
Speaker 3: super into birds, and it's just like a magical place
1:07:44
Speaker 3: for birds and reptiles, amphibians, you know, like see these
1:07:48
Speaker 3: cool snakes. And it was amazing. Yeah, I loved it.
1:07:51
Speaker 2: Let's talk about the the Arctic stuff, Phil, you jump
1:07:56
Speaker 2: us to the Arctic stuff. Yeah, running word is that
1:07:59
Speaker 2: at the beginning of.
1:08:00
Speaker 3: The end here, Yeah, towards the end, we could do
1:08:02
Speaker 3: maybe that like silhouetted wolfbox.
1:08:06
Speaker 2: Oh scene, So where are we at here? What's going on?
1:08:09
Speaker 2: Like where are we at in your career? And where
1:08:11
Speaker 2: are we at and on the earth?
1:08:13
Speaker 4: I mean, first of all, visually, we could be in
1:08:15
Speaker 4: the in the Paleolithic.
1:08:16
Speaker 2: Because that could be a mammoth. Yeah, the way that
1:08:18
Speaker 2: horn sticking out, it could be a mammoth.
1:08:21
Speaker 4: I mean it's just striking im.
1:08:22
Speaker 5: It's like this could be anywhere across thousands of years
1:08:25
Speaker 5: of time.
1:08:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're looking at is three canine figures, silhouetted. There's
1:08:33
Speaker 2: heavy cloud cover that's black, the earth is black. Sandwich
1:08:39
Speaker 2: between the black of the cloud cover and the black
1:08:41
Speaker 2: of the earth is a narrow band occupied by three
1:08:45
Speaker 2: black canine figures and a very wooly tusky horny looking.
1:08:51
Speaker 3: Uh not that kind.
1:08:55
Speaker 2: Horned shape, nondescript shape of hair and horn. That was
1:09:02
Speaker 2: some great descriptive narration there. I think the audio only
1:09:05
Speaker 2: listeners will be please.
1:09:06
Speaker 5: Yeah, they might be getting the better end of the deal.
1:09:10
Speaker 2: I made it sound better.
1:09:15
Speaker 3: So we are. We're at eighty degrees north. We are
1:09:20
Speaker 3: on the furthest northern land mass in Canada. It's called Elosmere.
1:09:23
Speaker 3: Island and this photos from twenty eighteen, So this is, yeah,
1:09:28
Speaker 3: a couple of years into my career. I think I
1:09:30
Speaker 3: officially started working for National Geographic in twenty fourteen on
1:09:34
Speaker 3: the Yellowstone Project. And this place, as Randall mentioned, it
1:09:39
Speaker 3: is it is like stuck in time, like you can
1:09:42
Speaker 3: go there and it's the closest feeling that I've ever
1:09:45
Speaker 3: had to like being on a place of scene, landscape,
1:09:48
Speaker 3: place that hasn't changed very much at all since the
1:09:52
Speaker 3: glacier is receded. And the draw to this place, and
1:09:57
Speaker 3: it was covered National Geographic in the late eighties by
1:10:00
Speaker 3: photographer Jim Brandenberg and researcher David Meach And so cover
1:10:05
Speaker 3: image of National Geographic is a like a white wolf
1:10:07
Speaker 3: kind of jumping between two ice floes that was in
1:10:10
Speaker 3: the eighties if you remember that one, and there are a
1:10:12
Speaker 3: couple other articles on it. And the draw of this
1:10:15
Speaker 3: place is that it is stepping back into that relationship
1:10:19
Speaker 3: where wolves aren't scared of people. And the allowance for
1:10:23
Speaker 3: that is basically like the same principle that I there
1:10:25
Speaker 3: habituated not necessarily because they're habituated there is they do
1:10:29
Speaker 3: see human settlement. There's like a weather station nearby that
1:10:31
Speaker 3: they can go visit if they decide to and like
1:10:33
Speaker 3: peon stuff, and it's kind of just like a recreational
1:10:36
Speaker 3: outing for the wolves to go there. But it's mostly
1:10:39
Speaker 3: kind of the My understanding of the wolf world from
1:10:45
Speaker 3: time here and reading is is like this is how
1:10:48
Speaker 3: wolves were even around here, Like they were curious. I
1:10:52
Speaker 3: mean Lewis and Clark journals and Autumn journals that Dan
1:10:55
Speaker 3: Flores talked about it and his podcast.
1:10:57
Speaker 2: He Died for You, Louis Clark the killed one with
1:10:59
Speaker 2: a stick.
1:11:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, Clark Bay and edited one. They would just be
1:11:02
Speaker 3: like laying on the sandbars when they're going up the
1:11:04
Speaker 3: river and like, bitch, be curious. They'd be around camp
1:11:06
Speaker 3: all the time and be curious. And here it's that
1:11:10
Speaker 3: same deal where they were just like come up, they'll
1:11:12
Speaker 3: sniff your boots. They want to steal stuff. That's like
1:11:15
Speaker 3: their main really, that's their main deal is they want
1:11:17
Speaker 3: to play keep away with you, like straight up, they
1:11:21
Speaker 3: like come in hot, they want to steal something. If
1:11:23
Speaker 3: there's anything on the ground that they can pick up
1:11:25
Speaker 3: it's gone, they're.
1:11:26
Speaker 2: Just curious what it is, if it's edible, whatever.
1:11:28
Speaker 3: Mostly like they picked up a camera, like one of
1:11:30
Speaker 3: the first meetings, so not even something smells good now,
1:11:33
Speaker 3: it smells like me, Like one of the first meetings
1:11:36
Speaker 3: was for me with this pack. I call them the
1:11:38
Speaker 3: Polygon Pack because of these cool polygon tundra formations that
1:11:42
Speaker 3: are that far north and they're den was close to
1:11:44
Speaker 3: that and has a camera on the ground. The wolves
1:11:47
Speaker 3: they do the surrounding thing, which is what freaks people out,
1:11:49
Speaker 3: and they're just catching scent. They're just being curious. So
1:11:52
Speaker 3: they're just like there's three wolves just satelliting me at
1:11:55
Speaker 3: like twenty feet and I'm photographing them. And I'd been
1:11:59
Speaker 3: there before and kind of knew a little bit about
1:12:03
Speaker 3: what was up with the wolves and had an understanding
1:12:06
Speaker 3: of it. And this one female darts in and grabs
1:12:07
Speaker 3: one of my other cameras. It's like a big, big
1:12:10
Speaker 3: bodied camera, it's like a ten thousand dollars thing and
1:12:12
Speaker 3: grabs it. How just grab the handle with her teeth
1:12:15
Speaker 3: like the with the grip and just goes so it's
1:12:17
Speaker 3: just like a little rubber kind of handles the cannon.
1:12:19
Speaker 2: One kind of sneak attack like in and out, just darts.
1:12:22
Speaker 3: In quick and it's and gone, And I find myself
1:12:25
Speaker 3: foolishly like running after it, like as if I'm gonna
1:12:28
Speaker 3: catch wolf, and I got big boots on, and it's like
1:12:31
Speaker 3: on the tundra, it's all hummocky, and and then the
1:12:33
Speaker 3: other wolves start kind of running with me because they're like, oh,
1:12:36
Speaker 3: this is like, this is it. We're playing the game.
1:12:38
Speaker 3: And I realized quickly we've all played keep Away with
1:12:41
Speaker 3: dogs probably or with kids at some point, and realize
1:12:44
Speaker 3: it's only fun while you're chasing. And so I stop,
1:12:48
Speaker 3: do the kind of like walk away, look over the shoulder,
1:12:50
Speaker 3: and she starts following me. I let her get maybe
1:12:53
Speaker 3: like five feet away, and then I like turn around,
1:12:54
Speaker 3: jump and clap and yell and she startles and drops
1:12:57
Speaker 3: the camera and come back. Then you understand what that
1:13:00
Speaker 3: relationship is.
1:13:01
Speaker 2: But yeah, this place is so you don't need to
1:13:04
Speaker 2: go look for him because they'll come find you.
1:13:05
Speaker 3: They'll come find Yeah. Yeah, you basically like set camp
1:13:08
Speaker 3: there and they'll come check you out.
1:13:10
Speaker 4: Yeah.
1:13:11
Speaker 2: You don't place a bait for him.
1:13:12
Speaker 3: There's no bait. There's no lure.
1:13:14
Speaker 2: I mean as part of the work. You don't like
1:13:17
Speaker 2: it wouldn't be that you'd place a bait.
1:13:18
Speaker 3: No, And there's no need, you know, it's like this
1:13:21
Speaker 3: basically the wolves. It's kind of like the chimp world
1:13:23
Speaker 3: where you're like, I can follow them we when I'm
1:13:26
Speaker 3: up there. So I've been up there for like productions.
1:13:29
Speaker 3: This was during that series Kingdom of the White Wolf
1:13:31
Speaker 3: that you mentioned early on film from that geo also
1:13:33
Speaker 3: an assignment from the magazine in that same time, and
1:13:37
Speaker 3: you're you're bringing up a ton of stuff. It's expedition style.
1:13:40
Speaker 3: It's like four wheelers. So you're following the wolves. So
1:13:43
Speaker 3: once you start down the road of like I want
1:13:47
Speaker 3: to be in a place where I can have a
1:13:48
Speaker 3: camera and be in front of wolves at close proximity
1:13:52
Speaker 3: every day for three months, then you then behind that,
1:13:55
Speaker 3: once you've made that decision, then behind that comes like
1:13:57
Speaker 3: ten thousand pounds of stuff. I see of food. I'm
1:14:01
Speaker 3: up there with a couple of people, we have a
1:14:02
Speaker 3: base camp, you have five pounds of fuel, you have
1:14:05
Speaker 3: four wheelers. It's daylight all summer until like August thirtieth,
1:14:10
Speaker 3: then you get the first little dip of sunset, and
1:14:13
Speaker 3: so you're just you're doing sometimes twenty thirty forty hour
1:14:17
Speaker 3: days and you're just following the wolves.
1:14:20
Speaker 2: Following them hunting, setting up camp or always coming back
1:14:22
Speaker 2: to base camp.
1:14:23
Speaker 3: So the first time went up there was with a
1:14:24
Speaker 3: team that they had a base camp all the time
1:14:27
Speaker 3: and these little dinky like two fifty ATVs, and I
1:14:31
Speaker 3: just saw that there was this amazing opportunity where like
1:14:34
Speaker 3: you bring up bigger ATVs five hundreds or seven hundreds, and
1:14:37
Speaker 3: you camp off your ATVs for extented period of time
1:14:39
Speaker 3: and then you can follow the wolves like.
1:14:41
Speaker 2: Have to do big round trips.
1:14:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I have do big round trips, and like
1:14:44
Speaker 3: they go hunting and they can do like sixty miles
1:14:46
Speaker 3: over the course of two days.
1:14:47
Speaker 2: You're gonna miss stuff.
1:14:48
Speaker 3: That's what I wanted. I want to I mean, I
1:14:50
Speaker 3: want to see all of their life. You don't want
1:14:52
Speaker 3: to miss anything. But the hunting is like, that's the
1:14:55
Speaker 3: behavior that made wolves essentially what they are is they
1:14:58
Speaker 3: had to solve that problem of how do we as
1:15:02
Speaker 3: a smaller predator take down bigger things. We have to
1:15:05
Speaker 3: do it together. We have to defend territory from other wolves,
1:15:07
Speaker 3: and we have to hunt together.
1:15:11
Speaker 2: How many wolves are on Elsmere in how many muskogs?
1:15:16
Speaker 3: There was an estimate maybe fifteen years ago or So
1:15:20
Speaker 3: that was two hundred Arctic wolves for the entire Canadian
1:15:23
Speaker 3: Arctic for the entire Arctic period, which I think is.
1:15:28
Speaker 2: Low two hundred white phase wolves.
1:15:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, because they're all through none of it. They're in greenland.
1:15:34
Speaker 3: This is not this is a Yellowstone wolf. But yeah,
1:15:40
Speaker 3: there you get a view of.
1:15:42
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, look at that place.
1:15:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a cool landscape. This is a this is
1:15:46
Speaker 3: a story.
1:15:47
Speaker 2: So here we're like, we're just looking at an Arctic
1:15:49
Speaker 2: landscape and there's one wolf in the foreground and another
1:15:52
Speaker 2: half dozens scooting along. Kind of dirty white. It almost
1:15:56
Speaker 2: looks like blood on got blood on his foot.
1:15:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, its kind of breaks territory. Does remind me of
1:16:01
Speaker 3: some of that bad lands. You know, it's very well eroded.
1:16:05
Speaker 2: What an incredible picture.
1:16:07
Speaker 3: He's wet, he's gone through, yeah, a little creek earlier,
1:16:13
Speaker 3: but he's got a little bit on him. He's got
1:16:15
Speaker 3: a little blood from a hare, Arctic hare that he
1:16:17
Speaker 3: had hunted earlier. They coordinated try to hunt this big.
1:16:20
Speaker 3: The hairs up there will group in like groups of
1:16:22
Speaker 3: one hundred, like pure white hairs. Pretty cool to see
1:16:25
Speaker 3: on the landscape. But yeah, this scene was one where
1:16:30
Speaker 3: you know, I was up there with teams for multiple years,
1:16:33
Speaker 3: film for Planet or three, a couple other productions over
1:16:37
Speaker 3: the years, and then was up there with a research
1:16:38
Speaker 3: team that was researching we'll get into this, but this
1:16:41
Speaker 3: disease that's affecting muscos and big die offs in the
1:16:43
Speaker 3: north climate change related. And I went up and spent
1:16:47
Speaker 3: two weeks just by myself with the wolves and no
1:16:51
Speaker 3: ATV is just on foot and set up a little
1:16:53
Speaker 3: spike camp and wasn't producing anything. Was just up there
1:16:58
Speaker 3: to walk around with them as much as I could,
1:17:01
Speaker 3: which didn't think of me very much, but ended up
1:17:03
Speaker 3: being every day it's been with them. They had their
1:17:05
Speaker 3: pups nearby the rendezvous site, and there were fourteen adults
1:17:07
Speaker 3: and five pups, and there was this one kind of
1:17:10
Speaker 3: midnight I got woken up light was getting good, woken
1:17:13
Speaker 3: up by some fox kits, and I see the wolves
1:17:15
Speaker 3: are starting to get ready. They were a mile down
1:17:17
Speaker 3: and they're starting to get ready to kind of go
1:17:19
Speaker 3: out to go hunt. And I saw some Muskox herds
1:17:21
Speaker 3: in the distance, and so I went down to the wolves,
1:17:23
Speaker 3: and then I went straight to the muskos and was
1:17:25
Speaker 3: trying to like run between and fill the gap and
1:17:28
Speaker 3: get there before the wolves did. And this wolf I've
1:17:31
Speaker 3: known for years called him Gray Mane. He's got the
1:17:33
Speaker 3: little gray coat. This is when he's a yearling. And
1:17:37
Speaker 3: I'm running ahead of them, and gray Maine's leading. He
1:17:40
Speaker 3: was kind of the alpha at this time. And I
1:17:43
Speaker 3: look behind me. He's common and the other wolves are coming
1:17:45
Speaker 3: behind him. And I realized that this one day is
1:17:47
Speaker 3: that Gray Mane and he's running next to me. We're
1:17:49
Speaker 3: both running towards Muskox. And it was this very quick
1:17:54
Speaker 3: realization of like, oh, this is what we've done for
1:17:57
Speaker 3: a long time. This is how this would have started domestication.
1:18:01
Speaker 3: You'd have wolves that were curious, unafraid of humans. You'd
1:18:04
Speaker 3: be out hunting the same exact animals and you'd bump
1:18:06
Speaker 3: into them like this, and you build a relationship. Probably
1:18:08
Speaker 3: and the wolves realized quickly that, oh, these guys throw
1:18:12
Speaker 3: projectiles because intu it still that they hunt muscos in
1:18:16
Speaker 3: like that. They'll use dogs, bay up, get a whole
1:18:18
Speaker 3: group of muscos into rosette, just create that defensive circle,
1:18:22
Speaker 3: and then they'll just lob projectiles in to the herd
1:18:26
Speaker 3: and get food. And the wolves would realize quickly that
1:18:29
Speaker 3: was an amazing relationship.
1:18:30
Speaker 2: So well, how is how is this island? How is
1:18:33
Speaker 2: the island administered?
1:18:36
Speaker 3: It is a mix, so like the colonial Canadian government
1:18:42
Speaker 3: controls and own some of it. There's also like Intuit
1:18:48
Speaker 3: the province of nunav which is self governed.
1:18:51
Speaker 2: As part of Elsmere.
1:18:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean they like technically it's all within nune
1:18:55
Speaker 3: of it, but the Canadian government still like there's a
1:18:58
Speaker 3: military base in the north, there's a weather station, and
1:19:00
Speaker 3: there's one habitation on the southern end that's maybe like
1:19:04
Speaker 3: one hundred and fifty people called Greece. Fior Is the
1:19:06
Speaker 3: furthest habitation in Canada. But they were moved through a
1:19:11
Speaker 3: colonial imperialism idea of having like people being born on
1:19:15
Speaker 3: all your sovereign lands or whatever they call it by colonialism.
1:19:20
Speaker 3: So they brought people from mainland Quebec and just like
1:19:24
Speaker 3: drop them off on this pretty rough part of the
1:19:27
Speaker 3: island on the southern end, and basically we're like good
1:19:30
Speaker 3: like good luck. Didn't tell them how long they were
1:19:32
Speaker 3: going to be there, and it's kind of like a
1:19:35
Speaker 3: nightmare scene. But they've survived and some people went back
1:19:39
Speaker 3: home maybe years later. They were given the opportunity, but
1:19:41
Speaker 3: a lot of people stayed, so they were initially like
1:19:44
Speaker 3: caribou mainland hunters there. Now kind of there's some caribou
1:19:49
Speaker 3: up there, but the caribon population subspecies of periy cariboo
1:19:53
Speaker 3: is like totally tanked in the north and in Nune
1:19:57
Speaker 3: of it, and muscock's in and marine mammals to what
1:20:00
Speaker 3: they hunt now, But those guys don't make forays up
1:20:03
Speaker 3: here to hunt. There's a nine dollars bounty on wolves
1:20:06
Speaker 3: and none of it.
1:20:06
Speaker 2: They hunt wolves down where they're at.
1:20:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, got it, Yeah, got it?
1:20:10
Speaker 4: Oh wow.
1:20:12
Speaker 2: Yeah. So now we're looking at a very distressed young muskos,
1:20:22
Speaker 2: his nose tipped up to the sky. He's bleeding out
1:20:25
Speaker 2: of his mouth or his mouth's been mauled up, and
1:20:30
Speaker 2: he's got uh, i don't know, three four wolves ripping
1:20:33
Speaker 2: them all, kind of tearing them up.
1:20:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, these are what an image?
1:20:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, feel bad for watching stuff get killed like that.
1:20:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, it doesn't feel good. Yeah, I mean I feel
1:20:43
Speaker 3: bad for anything that doesn't die quickly.
1:20:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, even animals that I've got, they don't the wolves, Yeah.
1:20:52
Speaker 3: Why would you? I mean it's like I've been haveing
1:20:55
Speaker 3: professional hunters and it takes two hours for animals to die. Yea,
1:21:00
Speaker 3: So it's yeah, it's it's usually twenty minutes for wolves
1:21:04
Speaker 3: from when they engage, even if it's a big adult.
1:21:07
Speaker 3: Sometimes a little longer with the adults.
1:21:08
Speaker 2: But you know in in uh the Wood Buffalo National Park,
1:21:15
Speaker 2: I think that they they did. They did the study
1:21:17
Speaker 2: is a long time ago. How long it takes them
1:21:19
Speaker 2: to bring one down. It was about six hours for
1:21:23
Speaker 2: a buffalo.
1:21:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally.
1:21:25
Speaker 2: But it's a whole dance.
1:21:26
Speaker 3: It's a dance, and it's a lot of like preamble,
1:21:29
Speaker 3: it's motion. It's not all like melee.
1:21:31
Speaker 2: No, not a lot of like sitting watch and seeing
1:21:35
Speaker 2: what's going. And that's how isolating.
1:21:36
Speaker 3: That's how these unfold too. Okay, you could technically be
1:21:39
Speaker 3: hunting for I've seen six to ten hour hunts, but
1:21:42
Speaker 3: they're sleeping for half of that and then just see
1:21:45
Speaker 3: and watch up. They'll pressure them, disengage, pressure, disengage, and
1:21:49
Speaker 3: do that whole deal because they selecting who they want,
1:21:51
Speaker 3: they need them to They either need to startle them
1:21:55
Speaker 3: and get them to scatter, so they'll hunt the wind
1:21:57
Speaker 3: a lot and hunt. Like one of the first times
1:21:59
Speaker 3: I saw it was I with the wolves traveling I'm
1:22:02
Speaker 3: on the four wheeler. They're heading off. They're in hunt mode,
1:22:05
Speaker 3: and they suddenly I can see the landscape in front
1:22:08
Speaker 3: of me, but it is it's kind of like Central
1:22:10
Speaker 3: Montana breaks. There's little dips and swells and koolies, and
1:22:15
Speaker 3: suddenly the wolves are at full tilt and I can't
1:22:17
Speaker 3: see anything ahead of them. And then we get over
1:22:20
Speaker 3: this little depression and then there's like a muskox in there.
1:22:23
Speaker 3: They yeah, there are two balls in there. So they
1:22:26
Speaker 3: were hitting speed to try to create chaos first, but
1:22:30
Speaker 3: the bulls are too big and nothing. They didn't.
1:22:34
Speaker 2: So if they pull up on those bulls, yeah, do
1:22:37
Speaker 2: they see it and see what they're dealing with, like
1:22:41
Speaker 2: in terms of demographics so to speak, and just call
1:22:44
Speaker 2: it off or do they still go kind of tests?
1:22:46
Speaker 3: They test?
1:22:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, they want they want to anybody injure what's going on.
1:22:50
Speaker 3: They want to see them move, so like he's playing
1:22:51
Speaker 3: on a bad ankle, you know, totally. Yeah, Yeah, you'll
1:22:54
Speaker 3: get up to them. They'll be like laying down. Let's
1:22:57
Speaker 3: say there's like a bull that's ruminating, laying down, and
1:23:00
Speaker 3: they'll get them to stand up, okay, and get them.
1:23:02
Speaker 2: To whirl if they want to see what they want
1:23:04
Speaker 2: to get them.
1:23:04
Speaker 3: To see, because they I mean they they catalog I mean,
1:23:07
Speaker 3: I'm sure they have like this landscape map and based
1:23:11
Speaker 3: on prey as well, and they'll know if there's an
1:23:13
Speaker 3: old bowl that's like on his last got.
1:23:15
Speaker 2: It and and they like that that image we looked
1:23:18
Speaker 2: at they're on a calf.
1:23:20
Speaker 3: Yep, that's their preferred Okay, that's their I mean, it's they.
1:23:24
Speaker 3: So they're trying to siphon them off. They they want
1:23:26
Speaker 3: the muskos and to stampede. I've never seen buffalo do
1:23:29
Speaker 3: it a little bit, you know, Kate Buffalo do it
1:23:32
Speaker 3: where they actually stand their ground against lions. Buffalo a
1:23:37
Speaker 3: little bit with wolves here where they gather up the
1:23:39
Speaker 3: group together. But the muskos in are real good at that.
1:23:42
Speaker 3: I mean, that's their move is not breaking the group,
1:23:44
Speaker 3: not breaking the group. If they can hold it, then
1:23:46
Speaker 3: like the wolves can't do it. They basically can't do anything.
1:23:48
Speaker 3: And especially yeah, especially this time of year. You can
1:23:52
Speaker 3: see there's little bit of foliage change, a little bit
1:23:54
Speaker 3: of orange on the ground. That's the Arctic willow that's changing.
1:23:57
Speaker 3: And this is the breeding season, the running season for
1:23:59
Speaker 3: the muscles, like August and so you'll have a herd
1:24:03
Speaker 3: of let's say, you know, ten cows and calf pairs,
1:24:07
Speaker 3: and then you have a herd bowl with them, and
1:24:10
Speaker 3: so the cow calf pairs group up in the rosette,
1:24:12
Speaker 3: and then the herd bull is just he's just throwing
1:24:15
Speaker 3: wolves if need be. But the wolves can't do anything,
1:24:17
Speaker 3: and they can't do anything against him, but they want
1:24:19
Speaker 3: to get them to move. They want to get the
1:24:21
Speaker 3: back end exposed and they can pull on a calf
1:24:23
Speaker 3: and then get to them.
1:24:24
Speaker 2: When you're staking out with these guys and hanging out
1:24:26
Speaker 2: with these wolves, how how how many days pass between
1:24:34
Speaker 2: an event like this? Between like from successful hunt to
1:24:39
Speaker 2: successful hunt?
1:24:39
Speaker 3: How much time goes by and you get three or
1:24:41
Speaker 3: four days depending on like how big the animals did
1:24:44
Speaker 3: they take down? I mean once they killed this animal,
1:24:47
Speaker 3: it was basically like hide in twelve hours with there
1:24:53
Speaker 3: were six adult wolves, but then they chilled for four pups.
1:24:56
Speaker 3: They'll still go on walkabouts, but yeah, they chilled. They
1:24:59
Speaker 3: chilled for except for like fifteen hours they chilled out,
1:25:02
Speaker 3: but then they go on, like they go walk around
1:25:04
Speaker 3: for fun. They'll do border patrols too.
1:25:06
Speaker 2: H m hmm. Yeah, So here we got a pop
1:25:12
Speaker 2: and I'm assuming a female.
1:25:14
Speaker 3: That's that's Gray Maine still when he was a yearling. Yeah,
1:25:16
Speaker 3: just big brother.
1:25:18
Speaker 5: And he's he's got his paws and his nose resting
1:25:20
Speaker 5: on a hoof.
1:25:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, muscock's leg.
1:25:24
Speaker 4: Like the way that my dog will do to my
1:25:25
Speaker 4: crocs at home.
1:25:27
Speaker 3: Yep, exactly. Yeah, just these scenes that and I'm there.
1:25:31
Speaker 2: I'm just like, how close are you there?
1:25:32
Speaker 3: Closer to than med to you like half of the
1:25:34
Speaker 3: stream media. There's like a wide angle lens.
1:25:37
Speaker 2: I don't care.
1:25:38
Speaker 3: Spend a month with them. I mean the beginn took
1:25:40
Speaker 3: It takes time, like the beginning. I was interesting that
1:25:43
Speaker 3: the pups were actually the most scared of the group,
1:25:45
Speaker 3: all the six adults in this pack. During this time,
1:25:49
Speaker 3: all the six adults were fine. There was the three
1:25:51
Speaker 3: that came up when I stole my camera. The other
1:25:53
Speaker 3: three adults are back with the pops. They were giving
1:25:55
Speaker 3: zero sign of fear about me. But the pups were like,
1:25:59
Speaker 3: we got it, this is we gotta get out of here.
1:26:01
Speaker 2: Would they draw the line at you touching them?
1:26:04
Speaker 3: So I would set boundaries like I would bop them
1:26:07
Speaker 3: like nose, like hey, you gotta give some space. You know,
1:26:12
Speaker 3: I'd stand up and walk towards them or push them
1:26:15
Speaker 3: a few times like this the previous photo here, there's
1:26:19
Speaker 3: another hunt scene where this is in the dark. I
1:26:22
Speaker 3: had a little flash trying to light it. But they
1:26:24
Speaker 3: have another calf as a separate hunt scene. Three of
1:26:26
Speaker 3: the wolves working this calf, and one of the wolves
1:26:29
Speaker 3: I've known for a long time, Bright Eyes. I'm again
1:26:33
Speaker 3: just kind of me to you to this whole actual,
1:26:34
Speaker 3: the whole thing happening, them hunting and killing, and they're
1:26:37
Speaker 3: obviously not worried. But one time in that melee, the
1:26:41
Speaker 3: Musko's calf bucked, Bright Eyes, and I'm kneeling down and
1:26:45
Speaker 3: she comes and she just falls on my lap. She's
1:26:47
Speaker 3: just like fully in my lap and I just push
1:26:49
Speaker 3: her back in. She didn't even bother look back. She
1:26:52
Speaker 3: just like went back in the system and started to
1:26:54
Speaker 3: hunt again.
1:26:54
Speaker 2: You ever grab any that meat and eat it yourself?
1:26:57
Speaker 3: This one I did. It was the only time I
1:26:59
Speaker 3: did it. Yeah, I cut off some backstrap. They were away,
1:27:02
Speaker 3: the wolves, the other three members and the pups were
1:27:05
Speaker 3: just over the hill and they were howling after they
1:27:07
Speaker 3: killed a muskox calf, So they were gone. I didn't
1:27:11
Speaker 3: really want to have them see me taking it. I
1:27:13
Speaker 3: felt like there was some like, yeah, some like betrayal
1:27:16
Speaker 3: around dynamic. Yeah, but yeah it was a yeah, pretty
1:27:21
Speaker 3: pretty beautiful scene to be able to have some easy meat.
1:27:26
Speaker 2: Man.
1:27:26
Speaker 3: Yeah, these are just incredible photos. Man.
1:27:30
Speaker 2: And then how much time total with the body work
1:27:33
Speaker 2: we're looking at, how much time total did you spend
1:27:35
Speaker 2: in this spot.
1:27:37
Speaker 3: I've been there, like it spans ten years basically of time,
1:27:41
Speaker 3: and then I've been there for like a year cumulative
1:27:45
Speaker 3: like three month trips.
1:27:46
Speaker 2: You know, And how often is a photographer trailing after
1:27:51
Speaker 2: these wolves?
1:27:52
Speaker 3: So now, and some of this is because of the
1:27:56
Speaker 3: work that I've done, Like there are people that are
1:27:59
Speaker 3: starting to go up there and do like tours. I've
1:28:02
Speaker 3: been asked a bunch and don't really have any desire.
1:28:04
Speaker 2: To do that, like because people want to go camp
1:28:07
Speaker 2: and just check it out.
1:28:08
Speaker 3: They want to photography tours get close to wolves. And
1:28:13
Speaker 3: and then there's film crews that go up there. And
1:28:16
Speaker 3: so then like there was a crew up there just
1:28:18
Speaker 3: this past year, the big like Disney project, and so
1:28:22
Speaker 3: there's yeah, there's still people that go there.
1:28:25
Speaker 2: So it's kind of will get it'll get like a
1:28:26
Speaker 2: little yellow stony where it's just like people hanging out
1:28:29
Speaker 2: film and stuff.
1:28:30
Speaker 3: It's so expensive to get there. That's the thing that
1:28:33
Speaker 3: prevents human presence is it's just like you know, it's astronomical,
1:28:37
Speaker 3: and so it just becomes a thing where people just
1:28:39
Speaker 3: don't got it.
1:28:40
Speaker 2: Logistically tough.
1:28:41
Speaker 3: Logistically tough, Yeah, you gotta be really Yeah, it's just
1:28:44
Speaker 3: a place that thankfully you can't drive to.
1:28:47
Speaker 2: So if you're a professional wildlife photographer and it takes
1:28:50
Speaker 2: so long to get the good images, like, walk me
1:28:55
Speaker 2: through the economics? What is it? Also new? Like click
1:28:59
Speaker 2: the show and it's there's the money do you? I
1:29:02
Speaker 2: mean like how like what do you how do you
1:29:05
Speaker 2: get paid?
1:29:07
Speaker 3: Yeah? So pretty much all my work is either assignment based.
1:29:13
Speaker 3: So that's a national geographic magazine assignment.
1:29:16
Speaker 2: But it's not a day rate. They want an image.
1:29:19
Speaker 3: No, it's it's gonna be a day rate. Yeah. Yeah,
1:29:21
Speaker 3: so it can be. It'll be like a budget. They'll
1:29:22
Speaker 3: be like all right, Like the Beaver story is like, okay,
1:29:24
Speaker 3: we have like fifty thousand dollars. Here's kind of our
1:29:29
Speaker 3: rough timeline. Fifty thousand dollars is like you choose.
1:29:33
Speaker 2: I'm on and you give exact figures.
1:29:35
Speaker 3: You don't need to do that, Oh I don't mind
1:29:36
Speaker 3: doing that, okay, and that you can just do it.
1:29:38
Speaker 2: All as one hundred dollars for all care go ahead.
1:29:41
Speaker 3: So that includes like all your expenses. I mean, that's
1:29:44
Speaker 3: that's stretched out over three years. It's not like a
1:29:46
Speaker 3: full time job for that period of time. So it's
1:29:50
Speaker 3: like a week here, a week here, day rates including that,
1:29:54
Speaker 3: if you have an assistant, if you have travel, if
1:29:56
Speaker 3: you have expenses, all that's including that. That's just like
1:29:58
Speaker 3: that's a fee let's say for the whole story and
1:30:02
Speaker 3: then the other story. The other way I do things
1:30:04
Speaker 3: is through great.
1:30:05
Speaker 2: But the problem, here's what I don't get about it.
1:30:08
Speaker 2: If we hire a camera guy and we're going to
1:30:10
Speaker 2: do something, we know there will be footage, yes, right,
1:30:16
Speaker 2: So if you're doing something that like the beaver thing,
1:30:21
Speaker 2: they're they're rolling the dice, yeah, because you could come
1:30:25
Speaker 2: back and say it's all mucky.
1:30:28
Speaker 3: Yep, yeah, got it.
1:30:30
Speaker 4: That's why I won't ever get an assignment for National Geographic.
1:30:33
Speaker 2: You need a body of work, right, So you're like,
1:30:37
Speaker 2: that's what I'm saying, Like when you click the shutter,
1:30:39
Speaker 2: it's not like there's the money, Like you might make
1:30:41
Speaker 2: an arrangement where you're saying, I'm gonna spend blank days
1:30:45
Speaker 2: and you're gonna get what you get and I'm gonna
1:30:47
Speaker 2: try my hardest and if I don't deliver, then I
1:30:49
Speaker 2: don't get work in the future.
1:30:51
Speaker 3: But that's the that's the cooker with it is it's
1:30:53
Speaker 3: like you have to deliver. You have to deliver, and
1:30:55
Speaker 3: it's kind of like there's that notion of I'm a freelancer,
1:30:59
Speaker 3: I'm not an employees so it's kind of like you're
1:31:01
Speaker 3: only as good as your last story kind of idea.
1:31:05
Speaker 3: If you bomb multiple stories, it's like, yeah, though.
1:31:08
Speaker 2: You don't g Yeah, you know, you're not the guy
1:31:10
Speaker 2: that gets it.
1:31:10
Speaker 3: And for a while, it's like being a hunting guide.
1:31:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, you charge X for your your heart, charge X for.
1:31:15
Speaker 5: Your hunt, and whatever sort of nice or shitty accommodations
1:31:19
Speaker 5: you put together for the clients comes out of that money.
1:31:22
Speaker 5: And then if you don't kill you know, animals with
1:31:25
Speaker 5: your clients, eventually stuff getting clients.
1:31:28
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:31:29
Speaker 2: Do you get easy assignments?
1:31:32
Speaker 3: Uh? Yeah, I mean some some ways, Like the beaver
1:31:36
Speaker 3: assignment in a way was easier in the sense that
1:31:38
Speaker 3: like beavers aren't hard to find. It's not like I
1:31:42
Speaker 3: have to go someplace like Uganda and try to find
1:31:45
Speaker 3: a bird or go to Lsmere it's hard to get to.
1:31:49
Speaker 3: So it's kind of like there was a mix where
1:31:52
Speaker 3: it was pretty easy. Yeah, I've had like one of
1:31:54
Speaker 3: the easy assignments I had was it was like a
1:31:57
Speaker 3: commercial assignment for a cell phone company and Kenya Safari
1:32:01
Speaker 3: Cam and they wanted a series of wildlife images of
1:32:05
Speaker 3: like a danger species in Kenya and also like a
1:32:09
Speaker 3: video compilation to go with it, and so they came
1:32:13
Speaker 3: to me with it. I hired a good friend named
1:32:15
Speaker 3: Bob Poole who grew up in Kenya, was one of
1:32:17
Speaker 3: the premiere wildlife cameramen in the world, does a lot
1:32:20
Speaker 3: of work in East Africa. And it's basically Bob and
1:32:22
Speaker 3: I cruising around to these amazing spots in Kenya in
1:32:25
Speaker 3: this like amazing film land rover platform that he designed,
1:32:29
Speaker 3: and it was awesome and there was no pressure, no pressure.
1:32:33
Speaker 3: It was just like knew we were going to get
1:32:34
Speaker 3: amazing things, get to see everything that you'd be excited about.
1:32:39
Speaker 3: Saw my first wild dog hanging out with Cheata, hanging
1:32:41
Speaker 3: out with them with hyenas. It was like socializing with hyenas.
1:32:46
Speaker 3: This lone female wild dog I sent At the research
1:32:49
Speaker 3: They're like, we don't ever see this. That was just
1:32:51
Speaker 3: a fun assignment because there's not any pressure.
1:32:54
Speaker 2: And do you ever get a call where you'd say,
1:32:58
Speaker 2: I'm gonna save us both the trouble and no, because
1:33:02
Speaker 2: it's just not You're not gonna be happy with it.
1:33:04
Speaker 4: The sasquatch photos aren't.
1:33:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, the sas squatch photos where we want a snow leopard.
1:33:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know I had one. I had one that
1:33:14
Speaker 3: was I did say yes to. It was learning. It
1:33:16
Speaker 3: was like my first assignment with Audubon magazine and a
1:33:19
Speaker 3: writer pitched it. And you know, writers have the luxury
1:33:22
Speaker 3: if they can write about things that happened one time,
1:33:25
Speaker 3: or they can write about it don't don't happen. They
1:33:27
Speaker 3: can write about it. I tried to like, but they
1:33:30
Speaker 3: can write about tall tales. Yeah, they can write about
1:33:33
Speaker 3: like yeah, myth and all these things. So this writer
1:33:35
Speaker 3: pitched the story about It's basically like a like a
1:33:37
Speaker 3: beaver keystone species story around beavers in Gradi els In area,
1:33:42
Speaker 3: and it hings around this guy named Billy Burton, who
1:33:47
Speaker 3: the writer thoughts swam with beavers, Like Billy told him
1:33:51
Speaker 3: a story from when he was a kid one time.
1:33:52
Speaker 3: This is what came out afterwards, that like he checked
1:33:54
Speaker 3: out a beaver lodge when he was a kid, just
1:33:55
Speaker 3: kind of like swam up into it and like checked
1:33:57
Speaker 3: out the beaver to buddies with just you just like looked.
1:33:59
Speaker 3: I think it was like maybe one or two times
1:34:01
Speaker 3: it happened when he was a kid, and Billy's an
1:34:04
Speaker 3: adult and maybe relaying the story to this guy in
1:34:07
Speaker 3: a social setting, and.
1:34:08
Speaker 2: The writer pitches it, and so the man who swam
1:34:11
Speaker 2: with beavers.
1:34:12
Speaker 3: The editors like, I want opening spread double page Billy
1:34:15
Speaker 3: swimming with beavers, And I was like, okay, cool, Like cool,
1:34:19
Speaker 3: there's a guy outside of Bozman and swims with beavers,
1:34:21
Speaker 3: Like I didn't know about that, but he's got habituated beavers.
1:34:24
Speaker 3: I'll go check it out. So show up. Billy showed
1:34:27
Speaker 3: me around with the writer walking around. He showed me
1:34:29
Speaker 3: where the beavers are and all this stuff. The writer
1:34:31
Speaker 3: leaves and I'm kind of just casual. I'm like, so, Billy,
1:34:33
Speaker 3: when do you swim with the beavers? Let me know
1:34:37
Speaker 3: what to get to my camera, and he yeah, he
1:34:39
Speaker 3: looks at me and it's just like, well, what are
1:34:42
Speaker 3: you talking about? Like, we don't. I don't swim with beavers.
1:34:44
Speaker 3: They're wild animals, Like they're they're scared of me, Like
1:34:46
Speaker 3: what do you mean? I was like wow, the writer said,
1:34:50
Speaker 3: he's like, oh, maybe I told him that when I
1:34:51
Speaker 3: was younger, I did a thing. So then I had
1:34:53
Speaker 3: this whole kind of afternoon of like what do I do?
1:34:56
Speaker 3: I gotta tell the editor this story is not possible.
1:34:58
Speaker 3: And Billy became a dear friend and I it just
1:35:02
Speaker 3: talked to him yesterday and I actually used his late
1:35:06
Speaker 3: father's bo to hunt my first archery elk this year,
1:35:10
Speaker 3: And so Billy's he's a good friend. Yeah, he's a
1:35:12
Speaker 3: really interesting guy. He's a lot of habitat restoration and
1:35:15
Speaker 3: huge ranches around the West, and he's a very interesting guy.
1:35:18
Speaker 3: Like him a lot. But yeah, that was a funny
1:35:20
Speaker 3: assignment where I had a call and actually told the editor.
1:35:23
Speaker 3: I was like that this thing isn't true at all.
1:35:26
Speaker 4: That's not really on you though it wasn't on me.
1:35:29
Speaker 3: No, But I took the burden of like can I'm yeah, yeah,
1:35:32
Speaker 3: can I make this a story? Can I salvage it.
1:35:34
Speaker 3: But yeah, I've had some other projects where it'll be
1:35:37
Speaker 3: like a you know, fashion something they'll want me to do.
1:35:40
Speaker 2: Yeah. So for years I traveled with photographers for magazine
1:35:45
Speaker 2: features as always a strange relationship we got along.
1:35:48
Speaker 3: H Yeah, Yeah, it was rather i'd be in the
1:35:50
Speaker 3: field phtographer. I did amazing three weeks with David Kwalman
1:35:53
Speaker 3: wrote the history on human chimp collision in Uganda and
1:35:58
Speaker 3: he wrote the story on that and we did three
1:36:00
Speaker 3: weeks in the field together. It was a dream.
1:36:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, what kind of wild stuff you got coming up?
1:36:06
Speaker 2: Like for what kind of pictures you're trying to get?
1:36:07
Speaker 4: Now?
1:36:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've shifted a bit in kind of the relationship
1:36:11
Speaker 3: of how I'm working And what does that mean. Well,
1:36:15
Speaker 3: it means like I've stopped going to the Arctic in
1:36:18
Speaker 3: ways that I don't enjoy, like going on the kind
1:36:21
Speaker 3: of the drive of you're there to do one thing
1:36:25
Speaker 3: and it's to like film. And I've started to try
1:36:30
Speaker 3: to understand more about like the reason I get in
1:36:33
Speaker 3: this was around conservation. The reason is to try to
1:36:36
Speaker 3: educate people about wild spaces and to hopefully have them
1:36:39
Speaker 3: be around for generations to come. And a lot of
1:36:43
Speaker 3: what I realize now is so much of it is
1:36:44
Speaker 3: just around like human health, Like how well are humans
1:36:47
Speaker 3: in an area, whether it's adjacent to national parks or
1:36:50
Speaker 3: even like in a country, Like how connected are we
1:36:54
Speaker 3: as an American nation to the natural world in a
1:36:57
Speaker 3: way that allows it to sustain itself for a long time?
1:37:01
Speaker 3: So what that looks like to me is like being
1:37:04
Speaker 3: more on the land with people being more around, Like yeah,
1:37:08
Speaker 3: reconnecting nature in a relational way in like a sacred way,
1:37:12
Speaker 3: like what is sacred to humans now in the natural setting?
1:37:16
Speaker 3: A lot of that is I think it's kind of
1:37:17
Speaker 3: lost in a way, but people are trying to rekindle it.
1:37:21
Speaker 3: There's cool work going on by like Bill Plockingh as
1:37:23
Speaker 3: an author Martine Precto is kind of this interesting thinker
1:37:27
Speaker 3: around like how do we rekindle our innate relationship natural
1:37:32
Speaker 3: worlds as like the human animal, like our psyches are
1:37:35
Speaker 3: totally honed for it to be to learn from Like
1:37:39
Speaker 3: essentially animism. Every culture in the world came from like
1:37:42
Speaker 3: an animism relationship. I must try to explain animism my kids,
1:37:45
Speaker 3: are you try to explain how do you approach it?
1:37:49
Speaker 2: What's that?
1:37:49
Speaker 3: How do you approach it Like what do you say.
1:37:52
Speaker 2: Well, we we it's hard to get there because we
1:37:54
Speaker 2: get there from a Judeo Christian understanding and then try.
1:37:57
Speaker 3: To walk backwards.
1:38:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's in there still, Like yeah, they would they
1:38:04
Speaker 2: would tell you if you ask them, does your dad
1:38:06
Speaker 2: lecture you buy animism?
1:38:07
Speaker 3: And they would say, yes, he does. That's great. I
1:38:10
Speaker 3: mean I think it is, like I think that is
1:38:14
Speaker 3: like one of the pass forward for like sustaining long
1:38:17
Speaker 3: term this idea of conservation, which is kind of just
1:38:20
Speaker 3: a yeah, what people understand around saving wild places and
1:38:23
Speaker 3: wild things, you.
1:38:24
Speaker 2: Know, a good way to get into animism. It's not
1:38:26
Speaker 2: really it's it's a roundabout way to get into it.
1:38:28
Speaker 2: But you formiar with this idea. Imagine that you imagine
1:38:32
Speaker 2: the earth. You imagine the earth as an organism in
1:38:36
Speaker 2: the river's arts, arteries. The atmosphere is its lungs. You
1:38:42
Speaker 2: follow me, yes, and then you can kind of get
1:38:45
Speaker 2: to through that, you can get to an idea like well,
1:38:47
Speaker 2: let's say we imagine like that the mountains. The mountains alive.
1:38:53
Speaker 2: You know, it's got heat, it's alive, it's got it's
1:38:57
Speaker 2: got things living on it, parasitic things live on it.
1:39:00
Speaker 2: You know.
1:39:00
Speaker 4: I mean there's all sorts of functional relationships.
1:39:03
Speaker 2: It's got things going on, makes weather, harvests the weather.
1:39:08
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, that's stuff like that. Yeah. And then and
1:39:10
Speaker 3: then that that is like there's a relationship there that's
1:39:14
Speaker 3: essentially always waiting for humans to step into. Like the
1:39:17
Speaker 3: book Bringing Sweetcraft speaks to that. Every indigenous land based
1:39:22
Speaker 3: community that I spent time with, that is how it works.
1:39:25
Speaker 3: And oftentimes that looks like you go on to land
1:39:28
Speaker 3: you fast. You do these experiences where you're actually in conversation,
1:39:35
Speaker 3: you're listening, you're asking, you're speaking things things that we
1:39:37
Speaker 3: can't speak to each other.
1:39:38
Speaker 2: You know.
1:39:38
Speaker 3: We talk about modern day therapy and it's wonderful that
1:39:42
Speaker 3: it's available and that people are accessing it, and it's
1:39:45
Speaker 3: a conversation that has had in time Like when my
1:39:47
Speaker 3: dad grew up, it wasn't even available. But there's also
1:39:51
Speaker 3: things that people don't speak to other people about ever,
1:39:54
Speaker 3: but you can speak to the natural world about.
1:39:57
Speaker 2: So where is the work in this for you? I mean,
1:40:00
Speaker 2: this seems like this seems like retirement thing.
1:40:04
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, ultimately it's like the thing that I
1:40:07
Speaker 3: am most excited about now is this idea of like
1:40:10
Speaker 3: how do you reconnect people to the human animals that
1:40:12
Speaker 3: we all are in like a holistic way, Like I
1:40:15
Speaker 3: think the modern wellness movement is just tapping into all
1:40:18
Speaker 3: these things that makes a healthy animal, like get a
1:40:21
Speaker 3: lot of sleep, eat whole foods, exercise, don't have chemicals,
1:40:24
Speaker 3: don't spend a lot of time sitting around, socialize. Like
1:40:27
Speaker 3: this is just like if you break down the human animals,
1:40:30
Speaker 3: those are things that feed us. Like there's the psychologist
1:40:34
Speaker 3: Francis Weller who talks about that you have primary versus
1:40:37
Speaker 3: secondary satisfactions related to the human psyche. Primary satisfactions are
1:40:42
Speaker 3: like storytelling, ceremony, ritual connection to food, dance, song, like
1:40:49
Speaker 3: the creative expression of humans, and those feed communities and
1:40:54
Speaker 3: have for tens of thousand of years. And then you
1:40:55
Speaker 3: have secondary satisfactions, which is what a lot of modern
1:41:00
Speaker 3: behavior is stuck in where it's like ambition, materialism, these
1:41:04
Speaker 3: things that are not rooted in like long term human
1:41:08
Speaker 3: health of like communities and societies. And for me, it's
1:41:13
Speaker 3: like again like getting back to like the reason I
1:41:15
Speaker 3: got in this work was a trigenerate change some way
1:41:17
Speaker 3: towards like healthy futures for everybody, for all life essentially
1:41:22
Speaker 3: and the work in this For me, a lot of
1:41:25
Speaker 3: it is like personal, like trying to understand what that
1:41:28
Speaker 3: my relationship is the natural world, going on the land
1:41:31
Speaker 3: and doing doing a four day fast in a wild
1:41:34
Speaker 3: place and being in one place doing essentially like a
1:41:37
Speaker 3: vigil and seeing what comes out of that. Like our
1:41:41
Speaker 3: brain shifts into a different way of being. You start
1:41:44
Speaker 3: to think differently, experience differently. Sensory experience becomes differently, going
1:41:48
Speaker 3: into katosis where burning fat instead of ingesting calories, and
1:41:52
Speaker 3: then spending time with being invited into communities, going to
1:41:56
Speaker 3: Sundance for the first time last year with the crow
1:42:00
Speaker 3: being part of sweats where you're like the whole idea
1:42:05
Speaker 3: around ceremony. For me, I didn't I wasn't engaged in
1:42:07
Speaker 3: that at all. As a kid, we didn't have any
1:42:08
Speaker 3: form of organized religion or spirituality other than like being
1:42:12
Speaker 3: a naturalist, like being outside, being curious.
1:42:15
Speaker 2: Mom.
1:42:15
Speaker 3: We would do like nature journals or we would draw again.
1:42:18
Speaker 3: There was no hunting. I was curious about it. I
1:42:20
Speaker 3: would I would kill things. I would borrow buy Buddy's
1:42:23
Speaker 3: BB gun and shoot things. But I was like out
1:42:25
Speaker 3: of curiosity without having like an actual guidance around it.
1:42:28
Speaker 3: And then as an adult, I've always kind of thought
1:42:30
Speaker 3: about like ceremony is like taboo is a bad thing,
1:42:33
Speaker 3: Like the idea of like religion is this thing that's
1:42:35
Speaker 3: done wrong to the world. That was kind of like
1:42:37
Speaker 3: an idea. And again I don't come from an organized
1:42:39
Speaker 3: religion background, but animism is this thing that's like available
1:42:42
Speaker 3: to all humans, Like it is like a kind of
1:42:45
Speaker 3: like a human right, and I think ceremony is as well,
1:42:49
Speaker 3: And like now is this time where I'm trying to
1:42:51
Speaker 3: bring that into life in a way that with hunting
1:42:54
Speaker 3: this year, for the first time, I hunted an animal
1:42:57
Speaker 3: in a way that was new to me and saying
1:43:00
Speaker 3: to him while he died, decorated him, adorned him, and
1:43:03
Speaker 3: then went through a practice of yeah, in a way
1:43:06
Speaker 3: of trying to honor him in that way versus yeah,
1:43:10
Speaker 3: the last four years of learning to hunt and doing
1:43:12
Speaker 3: it just kind of however it came. And like there's
1:43:16
Speaker 3: this idea around yeah. Robin rol Kimer has a quote
1:43:20
Speaker 3: around ceremonies, how we remember to remember, how we remember
1:43:26
Speaker 3: the important things in life, and whether it can be anything,
1:43:28
Speaker 3: it can be these like yeah, marking graduation or a
1:43:32
Speaker 3: step into a different place. It's like, how do we
1:43:34
Speaker 3: spend some more time with it to make it like
1:43:36
Speaker 3: an actual life changing event to our to our community
1:43:40
Speaker 3: and to ourselves.
1:43:41
Speaker 2: You know, you're still gonna take.
1:43:46
Speaker 3: Pictures, Still take yeah, still taking pictures.
1:43:50
Speaker 4: Yeah.
1:43:50
Speaker 3: I mean I was just on the Monomine Reservation a
1:43:52
Speaker 3: couple weeks ago, and they're doing some cool stuff with
1:43:54
Speaker 3: getting buffalo back on the land. Call it homecoming.
1:43:58
Speaker 2: So that kind of ties in the what you talking about,
1:44:00
Speaker 2: though it exactly what I'm talking about, So it's you
1:44:02
Speaker 2: kind of That's when I said the work of it,
1:44:04
Speaker 2: meaning like you can photo document. Yeah, I think places
1:44:07
Speaker 2: where this is happening in interesting ways, or places where
1:44:10
Speaker 2: humans are re engaging or continuing to engage around wild
1:44:15
Speaker 2: wild spaces and wildlife.
1:44:16
Speaker 3: Yeah, because I think like these places, these like very
1:44:19
Speaker 3: far off wild places are like they hold again that
1:44:22
Speaker 3: idea of like a regulated nervous system landscape, the idea
1:44:25
Speaker 3: of going back in time. It's amazing to be able
1:44:28
Speaker 3: to walk around with wolves in a place that you
1:44:30
Speaker 3: don't have to worry about it, Like I I can't
1:44:32
Speaker 3: do that in Yellowstone anywhere around here. I wouldn't want
1:44:34
Speaker 3: to do it. Ethically because those wolves will get hammered
1:44:36
Speaker 3: during hunting season and they do around Yellowstone every year,
1:44:40
Speaker 3: these wolves that kind of get a little used to
1:44:41
Speaker 3: people get shot. And ultimately it's like coming back to, Yeah,
1:44:48
Speaker 3: how do I use the skills that I have and
1:44:50
Speaker 3: I've created through photography and storytelling to like elevate some
1:44:54
Speaker 3: of these interesting stories. And yeah, the Monomine story is amazing.
1:44:58
Speaker 3: There's a group called Medicine Fish there. It's will nonprofit
1:45:01
Speaker 3: that uses youth work and empowerment basically like rekindling their
1:45:06
Speaker 3: animism relationship to the natural world through song and ceremony
1:45:11
Speaker 3: and a buffalo heard now that they have from the
1:45:13
Speaker 3: Nature Conservancy and I was there to help them film.
1:45:16
Speaker 3: They invited me on to help film that and yeah, beautiful.
1:45:19
Speaker 3: Hundreds of people show up and it's like that's what's like,
1:45:22
Speaker 3: that's it to me in a lot of ways, what's
1:45:24
Speaker 3: happening where it's like there's this feeling now in the
1:45:27
Speaker 3: modern world that I certainly get caught up in where
1:45:33
Speaker 3: we're like rushing away from this past that none of
1:45:36
Speaker 3: us fully understand, like we never lived what it would
1:45:40
Speaker 3: be like to you know, be on on the planes
1:45:43
Speaker 3: here inanimate relationship. You know, we can read about it.
1:45:48
Speaker 3: And I brought some books for y'all that maybe you've
1:45:50
Speaker 3: heard of them or read them, but like Pretty Shield
1:45:53
Speaker 3: and Ego Voice Remembers. There are these ethnographic interviews with
1:45:56
Speaker 3: elders in the nineteenths.
1:45:57
Speaker 2: We've read a lot of those, but I haven't read
1:45:58
Speaker 2: those ones.
1:45:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're great, and it's just the stories of like
1:46:01
Speaker 3: pre contact. You know, I liked in Hide Hunters how
1:46:04
Speaker 3: you touched on like you painted the picture for the
1:46:08
Speaker 3: listener around like what the buffalo meant to the planes people,
1:46:13
Speaker 3: and so so like we're rushing away from that in
1:46:15
Speaker 3: a lot of ways as a collective, modern dominant culture.
1:46:19
Speaker 3: This idea of like that was primitive. There was you know,
1:46:22
Speaker 3: there's a negative connotation around this older ways of living,
1:46:26
Speaker 3: that it was dangerous, that it was unpredictable, that it
1:46:29
Speaker 3: was you know, unhealthy, And so then we're rushing towards
1:46:33
Speaker 3: like the technological world. You know that like none of
1:46:35
Speaker 3: us know what's going to happen, but that's it.
1:46:38
Speaker 2: But in some ways that is humanity. You can't find
1:46:43
Speaker 2: that many experience. You can't find that many case examples,
1:46:46
Speaker 2: case studies where people are held out advancement and rejected.
1:46:54
Speaker 2: There are some yeah, like Sentinel Island, there are some Yeah.
1:47:01
Speaker 2: Typically people accept it.
1:47:03
Speaker 3: They want it.
1:47:05
Speaker 2: It's like to go and say to go and say it.
1:47:09
Speaker 2: Somehow we become we've become like that. It's a shame
1:47:15
Speaker 2: that we walked away from these things when again and
1:47:17
Speaker 2: again and again, cultures all around the world, you say
1:47:21
Speaker 2: to them, would you like food is like a guaranteed
1:47:26
Speaker 2: food supply, yes, we would. Would you like cellular service,
1:47:30
Speaker 2: yes we would. Would you like I remember reading this thing,
1:47:32
Speaker 2: even from the seventies. I was looking at cash expenditures
1:47:36
Speaker 2: and into it communities, those white gas, white gas. So
1:47:42
Speaker 2: I think number two cash expensures, canned food. Right, it's
1:47:45
Speaker 2: just people. I don't think you can go and look.
1:47:48
Speaker 2: It's just people again and again and again want the stuff.
1:47:53
Speaker 2: They're like, oh, you can make my life easier. You
1:47:55
Speaker 2: can make it more likely that I'll live to be
1:47:57
Speaker 2: in my seventies or eighties. You can make it less
1:47:59
Speaker 2: likely that my baby will die. I'm in yeah. Always Yeah,
1:48:05
Speaker 2: it's a little bit like like I get it, and
1:48:06
Speaker 2: I spend a lot of time existing, and I spent
1:48:09
Speaker 2: a lot of time exploring skill sets and and exploring
1:48:14
Speaker 2: things in the past. But I always remind myself that
1:48:17
Speaker 2: it was a very very deliberate decision around the world
1:48:22
Speaker 2: to move away from that lifestyle. It was imposed here
1:48:26
Speaker 2: and there, but typically people wanted it. It typically wanted it,
1:48:32
Speaker 2: and they will continue to typically want it.
1:48:36
Speaker 3: I think I think a lot of times it was
1:48:38
Speaker 3: it was forced. Like I don't think they were necessarily
1:48:40
Speaker 3: a choice.
1:48:42
Speaker 2: Man, if we'd have to do whole the show, I'll
1:48:45
Speaker 2: take you, I'll take you on on that one.
1:48:47
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:48:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think a lot of times there was a
1:48:50
Speaker 2: little bit of a bait and switch. But typically you
1:48:54
Speaker 2: can show up on the shore and you can lay
1:48:58
Speaker 2: out the goods and initially people come.
1:49:02
Speaker 3: But but I also think what you're saying, I think
1:49:05
Speaker 3: we're kind of sitting in a way, like they're interested
1:49:08
Speaker 3: in the tools. Yeah, yeah, they want to maintain the material.
1:49:11
Speaker 3: They want to Yeah, they want to maintain their their
1:49:13
Speaker 3: way of life. Perhaps well in a way, yeah, but
1:49:17
Speaker 3: I think they want yeah, they want guns.
1:49:18
Speaker 2: They don't foresee they want at the beginning of they
1:49:21
Speaker 2: want metal.
1:49:22
Speaker 3: Right, I don't. I don't think that they see it initially.
1:49:24
Speaker 3: I think it is like a natural thing, like and
1:49:26
Speaker 3: we see that anything. You see like someone with a
1:49:29
Speaker 3: cool system or whatever, they got some cool new tool
1:49:33
Speaker 3: that they are using to do the thing that we
1:49:35
Speaker 3: also like doing. And it's like instantly, you can't forget that.
1:49:38
Speaker 3: You can't know that there's a better way of doing
1:49:40
Speaker 3: it in a way or a more quote efficient way
1:49:42
Speaker 3: of doing something, and forget that. I think that is
1:49:44
Speaker 3: like human nature, Like we do want that. But I
1:49:47
Speaker 3: think I think I'm.
1:49:48
Speaker 2: Trying to counter what you're saying. I'm just saying this
1:49:50
Speaker 2: is something I've wrestled with. Definitely, I've intellectually wrestled with
1:49:54
Speaker 2: this whole bunch.
1:49:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the tools specifically, but I think like
1:49:57
Speaker 3: the way of life, I don't necessarily think that everybody
1:50:00
Speaker 3: wants like if they.
1:50:02
Speaker 2: There's probably a baked there's a baked in. Let's say
1:50:04
Speaker 2: there was a baked in nostalgia. But later you're like, man,
1:50:07
Speaker 2: should we have done that?
1:50:08
Speaker 5: Yeah, you're also not necessarily talking about material culture. You're
1:50:11
Speaker 5: talking about in that transformation or transition, you're talking about
1:50:16
Speaker 5: losing intangible, intangible things. And it's not that you like
1:50:23
Speaker 5: are working to go back the other way along this arc.
1:50:27
Speaker 5: But look over your shoulder and remember some of the
1:50:31
Speaker 5: core like human experiences and that that that have been
1:50:37
Speaker 5: lost in some ways.
1:50:38
Speaker 2: But even if even if the product we're getting so
1:50:40
Speaker 2: far out, even if the product is religion, people initially
1:50:44
Speaker 2: are curious. They're initially curious just it happens again and
1:50:48
Speaker 2: again and again all around the world. They're initially curious.
1:50:51
Speaker 2: Everybody was animist, virtually everyone was animistic. They became they
1:50:57
Speaker 2: became monotheistic. We'll say this for the next show. I
1:51:02
Speaker 2: got one last question for you. It's a business question.
1:51:06
Speaker 2: If we look at this is this is going to
1:51:08
Speaker 2: sound insulting, but it comes from me being a writer.
1:51:12
Speaker 2: Like oftentimes the way that it moves is is like
1:51:15
Speaker 2: it moves a that there's sort of like a writer
1:51:19
Speaker 2: is going to do a thing, let's find a photographer
1:51:24
Speaker 2: to go along with it. Do you get to Are
1:51:26
Speaker 2: you at a point in your career where the where
1:51:30
Speaker 2: you're the dog and the writer's the tail.
1:51:34
Speaker 3: Do you follow me?
1:51:35
Speaker 2: Can you do you have do you wield that power
1:51:37
Speaker 2: as sort of like a premier wildlife photographer where you
1:51:41
Speaker 2: could say, there's an image I'd like to get, it's
1:51:43
Speaker 2: so good you ought to find a writer.
1:51:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that happens. I don't claim to be
1:51:49
Speaker 3: to be anything of that, like powis prowess or level.
1:51:54
Speaker 3: But I think that like the not geo stories, all
1:51:58
Speaker 3: pitch something in an they'll sign a writer. I'll come
1:52:00
Speaker 3: with the writer.
1:52:01
Speaker 2: So what will be that the image leads.
1:52:05
Speaker 3: I mean National Graphic is I mean, it's definitely an
1:52:07
Speaker 3: image magazine. I say, it's like they like, you hook
1:52:09
Speaker 3: people with the cover. If they don't say on the
1:52:12
Speaker 3: newstands anymore, but if you hook people to cover, they'll
1:52:15
Speaker 3: they'll go through it. This is what they you know,
1:52:16
Speaker 3: that's what they say. People do with it, like look
1:52:18
Speaker 3: at the pictures and the picture interesting, then they'll read
1:52:20
Speaker 3: the article more. That's kind of how they speak to Yeah.
1:52:23
Speaker 2: It's like, uh, yeah, the photographer is the dog, the
1:52:25
Speaker 2: writer's the tale, because I would always imagine the writer
1:52:28
Speaker 2: as the dog and the photographer is the tale, and
1:52:30
Speaker 2: you need both.
1:52:31
Speaker 3: I mean it's like you need both.
1:52:32
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know. I don't think it should
1:52:34
Speaker 2: be the way it was when I was doing that.
1:52:36
Speaker 2: I think that in some ways, like looking at the
1:52:39
Speaker 2: wolf stuff, if someone said to me, hey, you can
1:52:41
Speaker 2: look at these pictures or you can read what this
1:52:43
Speaker 2: guy wrote, I'm like, I'll go with the pictures please,
1:52:46
Speaker 2: like on that ship.
1:52:47
Speaker 5: Yeah, and you could take an eighth grade essay and
1:52:49
Speaker 5: attach it to that and somebody be like, the best
1:52:51
Speaker 5: thing I ever read.
1:52:53
Speaker 4: It's a transformative piece.
1:52:54
Speaker 2: Yeah. If I was an editor and someone came and said, look, man,
1:52:59
Speaker 2: I don't get all these photos of all this crazy stuff,
1:53:01
Speaker 2: I'd be like, we should probably find a rider to
1:53:03
Speaker 2: go with.
1:53:05
Speaker 3: I mean, definitely has changed a lot, I think in
1:53:07
Speaker 3: that way. But yeah, I mean I we would need both.
1:53:10
Speaker 3: I mean need the dog in the tail, you need
1:53:13
Speaker 3: it all. No, but who gets to be the tail?
1:53:15
Speaker 2: And it gets to be the dog? Who gets to
1:53:17
Speaker 2: be the tail?
1:53:18
Speaker 3: Yeah? Well, so I likes.
1:53:19
Speaker 2: I got one last question. If okay, I think of
1:53:23
Speaker 2: the whole world, the depths, of the oceans, whatever, the
1:53:26
Speaker 2: whole world. If you could get a picture of one
1:53:30
Speaker 2: thing that you know to be a thing that happens right,
1:53:35
Speaker 2: like a sperm whale grabbing a giant squid, Like one
1:53:39
Speaker 2: thing that you know occurs, what would you get the
1:53:41
Speaker 2: picture next?
1:53:42
Speaker 4: Beaver under the ice?
1:53:43
Speaker 2: Yeah?
1:53:48
Speaker 3: What comes to mind. I was yels In just a
1:53:50
Speaker 3: couple weeks ago and read through the scene like found
1:53:55
Speaker 3: a big bowl carcass of elk with some research out
1:54:00
Speaker 3: they knew was there, the tom Mountain had been feeding
1:54:02
Speaker 3: on it, collared one they knew was there, and I
1:54:06
Speaker 3: ended up like tracing back the whole scene. And I
1:54:11
Speaker 3: would love just to get a cool, like a good
1:54:13
Speaker 3: image of like a mountain lion ambush, like coming in
1:54:18
Speaker 3: from the tree, jumping on the back of a bull
1:54:21
Speaker 3: elk and going through that world.
1:54:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a tough one.
1:54:25
Speaker 3: That'd be a tough one to get, but it's not impossible.
1:54:28
Speaker 3: This morning, the first hunge in this deck, we didn't
1:54:31
Speaker 3: get to it yet. I saw a family of cougars
1:54:34
Speaker 3: this morning on a walk are six miles from here.
1:54:37
Speaker 3: They just killed a mule deer.
1:54:40
Speaker 2: Uh, my neighbor's kid. They got a bull and when
1:54:43
Speaker 2: they went back up to get they left some meat
1:54:46
Speaker 2: hanging in a tree. Yeah, And they got up there
1:54:48
Speaker 2: and there's a lion sitting there nowing on it. They
1:54:50
Speaker 2: got a bunch of pictures of it. Yeah. Then they
1:54:52
Speaker 2: had to go in there and get their meat, spook
1:54:54
Speaker 2: it off, but had the gut pile.
1:54:56
Speaker 3: Yep. Yeah, that's when I walked in on. Initially it
1:55:00
Speaker 3: was confused and there was a raven that had been calling.
1:55:02
Speaker 3: She's a little bed there on the on the right.
1:55:04
Speaker 3: There they had just been there.
1:55:06
Speaker 2: And then well that's where the lions have been laying.
1:55:08
Speaker 3: Yeah that's cool. Wow.
1:55:09
Speaker 2: Oh there you go, the poor thing.
1:55:11
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:55:13
Speaker 2: God, you take nice pictures.
1:55:14
Speaker 3: All the time. There are cell phone images. You can
1:55:18
Speaker 3: hear mom just in the back there there they are.
1:55:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, excellent, man.
1:55:24
Speaker 4: Yeah, don't tell you honest where that was.
1:55:26
Speaker 2: No, he won't mess with them, kind he won't mess them.
1:55:29
Speaker 2: He did.
1:55:30
Speaker 3: He just let him go.
1:55:32
Speaker 4: Yeah, like everyone's going to be growing up.
1:55:35
Speaker 2: I tell you what. I was cutting Christmas trees. We
1:55:38
Speaker 2: were hunting trees in my family on Sunday, hunting trees.
1:55:44
Speaker 2: I'm sitting her with my kids. I'm not kidding, man,
1:55:46
Speaker 2: like park my daughter broke her foot, so she waits.
1:55:50
Speaker 2: She I was like, you gotta wait the truck. She's
1:55:51
Speaker 2: got a broken foot. My wife said, I'm not gonna
1:55:53
Speaker 2: leave from the truck, so I'll just sit in the
1:55:55
Speaker 2: truck with her two. So me and the boys strike
1:55:57
Speaker 2: off up the hill. We don't go one hundred yards.
1:55:59
Speaker 2: And I could get into how it was terrible Christmas
1:56:01
Speaker 2: tree hunting, but you can see it right there. All
1:56:03
Speaker 2: that frozen ice and snow makes Christmas tree hunting impossible.
1:56:07
Speaker 2: To every tree. You gotta tell the boys, get some
1:56:10
Speaker 2: sticks and whoop the tree. You can't judge them, you
1:56:14
Speaker 2: can't feel judge, like looking at a deer from the back.
1:56:16
Speaker 4: They all look, you know how it looks.
1:56:18
Speaker 2: So we had to beat we like beat three trees clean,
1:56:20
Speaker 2: and we were just sick of it, and we just
1:56:22
Speaker 2: decided to take one. Anyway. I look at one point,
1:56:25
Speaker 2: I look at the ground and our dogs running all over. Hell.
1:56:28
Speaker 2: I look at the ground and there's the brand newest,
1:56:32
Speaker 2: cleanest lion track, and I realized we kicked that sucker
1:56:36
Speaker 2: out of this little cluster of Christmas trees, beautiful track,
1:56:40
Speaker 2: and our dogs like all our dog doesn't notice anything,
1:56:43
Speaker 2: you know, but not even not even like like any
1:56:50
Speaker 2: sort of acknowledgment whatsoever that this has happened. Like never
1:56:55
Speaker 2: sticks or nose in the track, just nothing, not even there.
1:56:58
Speaker 2: It just doesn't register. It doesn't register that dog. If
1:57:01
Speaker 2: we weren't there, that dog probably not alive. Be a
1:57:05
Speaker 2: cat snack at coming on the show man.
1:57:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, I appreciate you having me on fascinating world.
1:57:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can't take a picture, dude. I took black
1:57:14
Speaker 2: and white photography one and to college.
1:57:18
Speaker 3: That's good thing.
1:57:19
Speaker 4: You can see he's more formally trained.
1:57:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, I realized all I had to do was take
1:57:27
Speaker 2: black and white photography. Wanted to to realize that was
1:57:29
Speaker 2: not a visual artist.
1:57:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't have it. You don't have it.
1:57:33
Speaker 4: You don't have it.
1:57:35
Speaker 3: I mean, you've done. I should just get the audio
1:57:37
Speaker 3: from my captions next time for this. Yeah.
1:57:43
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, your stuff's gorgeous, man, and and I love
1:57:46
Speaker 2: seeing it. And I got so excited about that beaver stuff.
1:57:48
Speaker 3: That was cool. Nice. Yeah, cool, I'm glad you called
1:57:51
Speaker 3: me in.
1:57:51
Speaker 2: So tell people how people want to go kind of
1:57:54
Speaker 2: what's the best way to go. If people want to
1:57:56
Speaker 2: just go see a lot of your work, where do
1:57:57
Speaker 2: they go?
1:57:59
Speaker 3: You can see it on my website running Donovan dot com, Instagrams,
1:58:02
Speaker 3: on other place I have a lot of presents. But yeah,
1:58:05
Speaker 3: also check out the Animus Valley Institute. Oh not my work,
1:58:09
Speaker 3: but oh not okay, But people that want to rewild
1:58:12
Speaker 3: themselves and rekindle that relationship to the animate world God,
1:58:15
Speaker 3: they offer experiences.
1:58:16
Speaker 2: And but on your website they can just go peruse
1:58:19
Speaker 2: all these.
1:58:20
Speaker 3: Years to crew's images and all that.
1:58:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, I do stuff we talked about today. They'd find
1:58:24
Speaker 2: on there some.
1:58:25
Speaker 3: Of it, some of it I haven't really showed people, Yeah,
1:58:28
Speaker 3: but some of it's available. Yeah. I have a museum
1:58:30
Speaker 3: exhibit that's traveling around.
1:58:32
Speaker 2: That was the country I forgot to ask, but one
1:58:34
Speaker 2: to ask about that.
1:58:35
Speaker 3: Oh that's right, Yeah, yeah, thanks, it's it'll be in
1:58:38
Speaker 3: Saint Petersburg, Florida next opens up in late March early April.
1:58:44
Speaker 3: But going down for the program for that, it was
1:58:45
Speaker 3: an Mmarillo, Texas just a couple of months ago in
1:58:49
Speaker 3: San Diego and after the museum.
1:58:50
Speaker 2: And what's the what's the called?
1:58:51
Speaker 3: Well, it's called wolves. It's comparison especially images of Yellowstone
1:58:56
Speaker 3: and Arctic wolves. God. Yeah, big, big of it. And yeah,
1:59:02
Speaker 3: lots of text with it as well, there is, yeah, yeah,
1:59:05
Speaker 3: lots of maps and some because.
1:59:06
Speaker 2: They had the image.
1:59:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, I had the images. Yeah, need some texts to
1:59:10
Speaker 3: go with it. Yeah. Yeah. It'll come through museum and
1:59:12
Speaker 3: the Rockies maybe in a couple of years, yeah, which
1:59:15
Speaker 3: I'm excited about.
1:59:15
Speaker 2: Yeah. Man, Yeah, that'd be real popular around here.
1:59:18
Speaker 3: I'm excited for it. Yeah. I want to go to
1:59:19
Speaker 3: Colorado too.
1:59:20
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, you do some work.
1:59:21
Speaker 3: Down there with wolves, some help. Yeah. All right man, Well,
1:59:25
Speaker 3: thank you very much, Thanks Steve, thank you, thank you all.
1:59:27
Speaker 2: Yeah.